Change PHPMyAdmin to view Arabic on English interface

I love phpmyadmin, it is a web interface for MySQL DB server, I usually use the English interface, but the problem with English interface that it doesn’t show Arabic string, of course you can change the whole interface to Arabic, but I don’t understand anything from that interface.

So I played with PHPMyAdmin code so I can use English interface but using Arabic character set, here is how to do it:

# vi lang/english-iso-8859-1.inc.php
... change: $charset = 'iso-8859-1';
... to: $charset = 'windows-1256';


UPDATE: PHPMyAdmin can show Arabic fine without problem even with English interface, if you have problem with Arabic it is a misconfiguration in your database, check this post for the proper way to handle Arabic in MySQL: MySQL: fixing errors of the past

• MySQL