警告：session_start（）：尝试使用日语字符破坏PHP 5.4上的未初始化的会话错误

Question

I have a standard oscommerce installation and when a session variable contains a multibyte character such as Japanese it creates the error "Warning: session_start(): Trying to destroy uninitialized session". The stack trace doesn't shed a great deal of light on what's causing the problem except that it is caused in the session class file on the following statement:

...
return session_start();

The Error is caused by a variable like this:

$shipping['method'] = {Japanese character string}

tep_start_session('shipping');

...and then the error is experienced on every subsequent page load.

Any ideas greatly appreciated!

Answer 1

This turned out to be caused by a complicated reason in oscommerce. I have noticed the same error in other international websites and therefore thought I would post the answer as there is very little information discussed elsewhere.

Many variables are stored in sessions, which may be stored in the MySQL database.

It is therefore critical that you change the collation of the "session" table in the MySQL database to utf8_general_ci to allow for the correct storage and retrieval of multibyte characters in the database stored sessions.