# Salesforce Arabic encoding issue



## ibrokamel (Jun 18, 2013)

I am currently having a problem entering Arabic names and numbers into my contact database on Salesforce. I have tried to solve it using Salesforce's suggestions but have not succeeded. Their suggestions included:

Unicode 8 and 16: Although I had originally used 16bit and the problem remained.

Any other suggestions still end up with an issue regarding unicode. However, I have tried using both 8 and 16 and nothing works. Thus far, Salesforce have not been helpful so I would greatly appreciate any help here.

Thanks


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## kilonox (Dec 3, 2010)

Ibrokamel, welcome to TSF 

You are going to need to set the MySQL charset to UTF-8 and the connection collation to utf8_general_ci, as well as setting your tables to utf8_general_ci. 

To do so, you will need access to phpMyAdmin, or the SQL shell. Then you will need to run the SQL query:


```
ALTER DATABASE db_name CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci
```
To do this globally (requires MySQL shell access), simply run from MySQL shell

```
charset utf8
```
 and you will be good 

Hopefully this helps.


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