[fw-mvc] Problem: Turkish Characters can not be saved to database

Hello all

I have a really very strange problem withthe Turkish characters.

I have a form where alumni registers itself. I am trying to convert all
data to lowercase and then write to database.

In the model I create a function

public function toLowerCase($input)
{
return strtolower(strtr($input,'ĞÜŞIİÖÇ','ğüşıiöç'));
}

After a successful admission I write the data to database in model as
follows.

function registerAlumni($alumniName,$alumniLastName,$alumniGraduateDate)
{
$data = array('alumni_Name'=>$this->toLowerCase($alumniName),
'alumni_LastName'=>$this->toLowerCase($alumniLastName),
'alumni_GraduateDate'=>$alumniGraduateDate);
$this->insert($data);
}

Up to here everything seems to be OK. But when I run the database query,
the characters that are entered in turkish are not written into
database.

I really do not know, if it is Zend or Mysql itself. I use UTF-8 as
character encoding and if I do not use toLowerCase method, it writes to
database without problem.

Any ideas are more than welcome.

E

mysql> select alumni_Name,alumni_LastName,alumni_GraduateDate from
gbhl_alumni order by alumni_ID desc
-> ;
+---------------------+-----------------+---------------------+
| alumni_Name | alumni_LastName | alumni_GraduateDate |
+---------------------+-----------------+---------------------+
| | mmmmmmmmmmm | 1991 |
| | mmmmmmmmmmm | 1991 |
| | mmmmmmmmmmm | 1991 |
| | mmmmmmmmmmm | 1991 |
| | mmmmmmmmmmm | 1991 |
| | mmmmmmmmmmm | 1991 |
| | mmmmmmmmmmm | 1991 |
| mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm | mmmmmmmmmmm | 1991 |
| | | 1991 |
| | | 1991 |