PHP & Oracle Cyrillic howto

Here is how to display and work with actual Cyrillic characters instead of unrecognised '???'
The following examples are suitable for fetching data between php and oracle.

How?
Just set the proper internal Cyrillic charset in the oci_connect function
example:

oci_connect('username', 'password', '',"BG8MSWIN");

List of Oracle's internal charsets you can see here:
http://www.daylight.com/meetings/emug04/Delany/charsets.html

Optional:
Once you've got Cyrillic symbols and not only ???(question marks) you can detect the encoding of a given string using:

echo mb_detect_encoding($string);

and then convert it via:

$string = iconv('utf-8','windows-1251', $string);

That's it! I hope the information helps you! by Nevyan Neykov

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