I'm having an issue with displaying Japanese chars properly.

Here's the deal.. I'm adding some PHP pages (a store/cart) to an existing HTML site built in Japan by someone. She used this charset.. Shift_JIS In the DB i am using sjis_japanese_ci on my tables. In the admin pages it's all good. My admin pages however don't specify a charset. So if i don't specify a charset on the front end pages, everything from the DB and even stuff i paste into a includes copied from her pages is fine, but the stuff already there goes to hell. If I use Shift_JIS as the charset my stuff goes to hell but the other stuff is fine. So wtf do I use that works everywhere?

Nobody?

nada huh?! sniff

Sorry, best I can offer is that somewhere along the line, the charset is getting screwed up. Thing is, it can happen in any of a number of places -- e.g. the PHP files (check the output encoding in a decent text editor), the database, even Apache itself...

Bottom line: charsets are a pain in the arse.

Thanks, but Fuck me I never figured this out yet.. I had everything looking good and then I got a call from Japan that it looked fucked her on their browsers wtf.. I'm copy/pasting it to see if that works.