they are posible code pages for the characters. Diferent languages have more characters than english. And other have different characters in all the alphabet. For example rusian, japanese, greek. So with that listbox you set what kind of characters will you encounter in your data. ----- Original Message ----- From: Bryan Schulz To: programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Sent: Tuesday, February 24, 2009 10:21 PM Subject: mysql settings hi, Anyone on here have att/sbc yahoo hosting and knows what all these combo boxes are? inside the php admin control panel: there are no headings but here is the list of combo boxes: ARMSCII-8 Armenian US ASCII Binary pseudo charset Windows Central European Windows Cyrillic Windows Arabic Windows Baltic DOS West European DOS Central European DOS Russian DEC West European GEOSTD8 Georgian ISO 8859-7 Greek ISO 8859-8 Hebrew HP West European DOS Kamenicky Czech-Slovak KOI8-R Relcom Russian KOI8-U Ukrainian cp1252 West European ISO 8859-2 Central European ISO 8859-9 Turkish ISO 8859-13 Baltic Mac Central European Mac West European 7bit Swedish UTF-8 Unicode do i need to know or worry what these mean? or do most people develop their database locally then upload it? Bryan Schulz The BEST Solution www.best-acts.com