Character Sets and Collations - Mastering phpMyAdmin 2.8 for Effective MySQL Management - page 238

A majority of the language files are also coded using ISO or Windows character sets,
with the goal of supporting older browsers. Also, when connecting to a pre-MySQL
4.1 server, a user can still choose a non-UTF-8 character set if his or her web server or
phpMyAdmin version are not configured to recode characters. (See the Data Recoding
section in this chapter.)
The availability of a UTF-8 language file in the Language selector depends on
both the phpMyAdmin version and the MySQL version. If we are using a
phpMyAdmin version before 2.6.0, availability also depends on some of the
settings in config.inc.php .
Versions of MySQL Prior to 4.1.x
Versions of MySQL before 4.1.x do not transform the data to the desired character
set, so the actual recoding is done directly by phpMyAdmin, both before sending
data to the MySQL server and after receiving it.
Data Recoding
Here is the most important configuration parameter for recoding, shown here with
its default value:
$cfg['AllowAnywhereRecoding'] = FALSE;
To activate recoding, we have to set it to TRUE . When this is done, phpMyAdmin
verifies that the conditions for recoding are met. For the actual encoding of data, the
PHP component of the web server must support the iconv or the recode module.
If this is not the case, and the parameter has been set to TRUE , the following error
message will be generated:
Can not load iconv or recode extension needed for charset conversion, configure
php to allow using these extensions or disable charset conversion in phpMyAdmin.
If this message is displayed, consult your system's documentation (PHP or the
operating system) for the installation procedures.
Before phpMyAdmin 2.6.0, the default config.inc.php file did not make use of
UTF-8 encoding, so the $cfg['AllowAnywhereRecoding'] parameter was set to
FALSE , and no UTF-8 languages were offered in the Language selector. To enable it,
we just changed the parameter to TRUE .
Since phpMyAdmin 2.6.0, the parameter is still set to FALSE by default, but the UTF-8
language choices are nevertheless displayed in the Language selector. This may lead
to encoding problems. (See the section The Impact of Switching letter in this chapter.)