charsets killing me

[sleidia]

Hello ;)

I run phpMyAdmin - 2.8.0.2 both on my local win/apache and on my remote linux/apache with exactly the same config file.

The local server has MySQL - 4.0.16-nt installed.
The remote one has MySQL - 4.1.19-standard.

Now, the problem is that, on the remote version, the language selector doesn't let me choose the shift-jis charset. Only the languages ( without their different charsets ) are listed in the drop down menu. And all of them are stuck with utf-8 as it seems. On the same page, it's written : "MySQL charset: UTF-8 Unicode (utf8)".
It's not the case on my local server.

So, how do I enable other charsets on my remote mysql server?

My local db is all in shift-jis and I need to have it in the same encoding on the remote server.

Many thanks to the ones who will come up with a solution :)

[sleidia]

Well , after lots and lots of trials and errors, it looks like the problem is more difficult than ever.

I have other databases with Japanese content on both local and remote servers and their data is displayed correctly.

But the last database will display only garbage whatever I try.
This stupid database doesn't want to output shift-jis encoded data even when new records are created from web forms that are all in shift-jis.

I've been designing Japanese websites for ages and it's the first time such a thing happens to me!!!

I simply don't get it.