To add arabic support to mysql change the character set of client, connection, database, results and system to the utf8 and the collation_connection and collation_database to utf8_general_ci to check these from mysql client select the database and run this command:
mysql> SHOW VARIABLES LIKE 'c%';
Now to change the character sets to utf8 run these commands;
mysql> SET NAMES 'utf8';
mysql> ALTER DATABASE db_name CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci;
To change only table character set run this command:
mysql> ALTER TABLE table_name CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET utf8;
To check the database or single table character set run one of this commands:
mysql> SELECT default_character_set_name FROM information_schema.SCHEMATA S WHERE schema_name = "db_name";
mydql> SELECT CCSA.character_set_name FROM information_schema.`TABLES` T,information_schema.`COLLATION_CHARACTER_SET_APPLICABILITY` CCSA WHERE CCSA.collation_name = T.table_collation AND T.table_schema = "db_name" AND T.table_name = "table_name";
To insert the data with php add these to the php code to support utf8:
header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8');
mb_internal_encoding("UTF-8");
mb_http_output( "UTF-8" );
Add this to the html pages:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
Add this to the form tag:
<form action="test.php" method="post" accept-charset="utf-8">
Also add the all the above codes for php query or other php codes and all form tages for arabic support.