title: how to insert arabic letters in mysql
body: <p>I have looked all over the net trying to find a single tutorial about inserting arabic letters into mysql via HTML &amp; PHP</p>
  
  <p>my HTML page looks like this</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" 
  "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"&gt;
  &lt;html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"&gt;
  &lt;head&gt;
  &lt;meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>and my php page is like this</p>
  
  <pre><code>// Connects to your Database 
  mysql_connect("localhost", "root", "") or die(mysql_error()); 
  mysql_select_db("castt") or die(mysql_error()); 
  mysql_query("SET NAMES 'cp1256'"); 
  mysql_query('SET CHARACTER SET cp1256'); 
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>when I browse the mysql DB, it appears like "?????" </p>
  
  <p>any suggestion?</p>