PDO_MYSQL DSN

Description

The PDO_MYSQL Data Source Name (DSN) is composed of the following elements:

DSN prefix

The DSN prefix is mysql:.

host

The hostname on which the database server resides.

port

The port number where the database server is listening.

dbname

The name of the database.

unix_socket

The MySQL Unix socket (shouldn't be used with host or port).

charset

The character set. See the character set concepts documentation for more information.

Prior to PHP 5.3.6, this element was silently ignored. The same behaviour can be partly replicated with the PDO::MYSQL_ATTR_INIT_COMMAND driver option, as the following example shows.

Warning

The method in the below example can only be used with character sets that share the same lower 7 bit representation as ASCII, such as ISO-8859-1 and UTF-8. Users using character sets that have different representations (such as UTF-16 or Big5) must use the charset option provided in PHP 5.3.6 and later versions.

Example #1 Setting the connection character set to UTF-8 prior to PHP 5.3.6

<?php
$dsn = 'mysql:host=localhost;dbname=testdb';
$username = 'username';
$password = 'password';
$options = array(
    PDO::MYSQL_ATTR_INIT_COMMAND => 'SET NAMES utf8',
); 

$dbh = new PDO($dsn, $username, $password, $options);
?>