SQLSTATE[HY000] [2054] Server sent charset unknown to the client

Asked Sep 04 '20 at 14:08

Active Sep 04 '20 at 16:35

Viewed 30 times

Dear whoever closed this: the solutions to that other question all involve making changes to the MySQL server, which I very specifically said I cannot do. So that question doesn't provide me a solution.

I'm trying to connect to a MySQL database with utf8mb4 as the character set using the following in PHP 5.6

<?php
require '../env.php';
try {
    $dsn = 'mysql:host='.$mysql_hostname.';dbname='.$mysql_database.';charset=utf8mb4';
    $dbh = new PDO($dsn, $mysql_username, $mysql_password);

} catch (PDOException $e) {
    print "Error!: " . $e->getMessage() . "<br/>";
    die();
}
?>

I cannot change the MySQL server's character set. I get a similar error with mysqli. What am I missing here?

edited Sep 04 '20 at 14:39

asked Sep 04 '20 at 14:08

wogsland

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Your server doesn't seem to support `utf8mb4` (perhaps it an old version). You can obtain a list of supported encodings with this query: `SHOW CHARACTER SET` – Álvaro González Sep 04 '20 at 14:36
`utf8mb4` is supported by mysql since version 5.5.3, and PHP 5.6 is EOL since 31 Dec 2018. I'd recommend you to upgrade both. – digijay Sep 04 '20 at 14:39
@digijay Yes, in a perfect world one wouldn't get handed old legacy applications to work with. – wogsland Sep 04 '20 at 14:42
@ÁlvaroGonzález Actually, I know that's the correct character set for the MySQL server. – wogsland Sep 04 '20 at 14:43
There isn't really a correct one, there's a list of several supported values. I can't recall when `utf8mb4` was introduced but it wasn't present in earlier server versions. If you can't use it, you'll need to switch back to `utf8`. – Álvaro González Sep 04 '20 at 14:47
I changed the dupe target to a more relevant question – Your Common Sense Sep 04 '20 at 16:36
@YourCommonSense I still think there has to be a simpler solution to this than upgrading the entire codebase to PHP 7 . . . – wogsland Sep 05 '20 at 15:04
yes. use utf8 instead of utf8mb4 – Your Common Sense Sep 07 '20 at 06:09

SQLSTATE[HY000] [2054] Server sent charset unknown to the client

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