Missing PHP extensions?

Hi again

I have been in touch with the guys in my website server company and they told me that everthing is set up and should be running. Unfortunately, I cannot find a solution. I tried to make a clean installation, and it does not get on. The with old an new version. The difference is with the messages that appear. When I install the 3.04 version the message that appears is:

This program requires the PHP 'mysql' extension.Please ask your hosting provider (or server administrator) to install missing PHP extension(s).

If I install the 3.14 version the message that appears is:

mysqli: error setting character set utf8mb4: Can't initialize character set utf8mb4 (path: /usr/share/mysql/charsets/)

The guy from the server told me to change the charset for each database, then change the charset for each table of the database, and then the charset for each column of each table of each database. He suggested to use the following code:

# For each database:ALTER DATABASE database_name CHARACTER SET = utf8mb4 COLLATE = utf8mb4_unicode_ci;# For each table:ALTER TABLE table_name CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET utf8mb4 COLLATE utf8mb4_unicode_ci;# For each column:ALTER TABLE table_name CHANGE column_name column_name VARCHAR(191) CHARACTER SET utf8mb4 COLLATE utf8mb4_unicode_ci;

Sorry, this all looks impossible for me.

Is there anything I can do? Should I change server? Can you suggest me a server where the database will definetely work?

Kind regards

Andreas Lazaris

Hey Andreas,

The commands your hosting service gave you would have set the charset and collation to the database to UTF-8, but we've already done that and that's actually part of the cause of the problem.

I've updated the test script I wrote  (it's on the same URL as before) so that it shows that the charset and collation are already set. Perhaps you could try contacting them again and asking if they can look into the issue? The problem is that we can't set the charset in the PHP MySQLi function, not the charset of the database its self.

If they're still unable to help, I'd recommend changing your hosting service to someone else. I'm in the process of asking around the office for hosting recommendations. Damon recommended Dreamhost, I'll update this post once I hear back from everyone else.

Cheers,

Greg