Whenever I try to enter data into text fields using either the load statement on an ascii file or an insert statement that has extended ascii (accented) characters in the range of 128 to 154 and then try to examine the data stored in MySQL I get gobbledegook characters. When I enter this same data from within the MySQL command line interface (in Windows 2K) the data displays correctly.

I am quite concerned about this because I am starting to build a PHP application that will take input from HTML forms and put them into the database using INSERT statements and I don't want to have this happen there.

Can someone suggest how I might correctly load this data from external text files?

Examples of the lines stored in the external text file are:

insert into artists (ArtistCode,ArtistID,Artist) values('real',229,'Real Bérard'); insert into artists (ArtistCode,ArtistID,Artist) values('rene',147,'René Lauthier');

thanks for your help, Bob Bruce, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada