title: blank data when inserting into MySQL database with PHP
body: <p>I made a form to insert and modify categories in my project.
  when i hit "submit" i get the record submitted into the database but it appears empty !
  and if i go to the databse field and write the text myself it will appear good in MySQL and and "????" in the browser !</p>
  
  <p>here is the code i wrote:</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd"&gt;
  &lt;html&gt;
  &lt;body&gt;
  
   &lt;?php
  $con = mysql_connect("localhost","user","pass");
  if (!$con)
    {
    die('Could not connect: ' . mysql_error());
    }
  
  mysql_select_db("mydb", $con);
  
  $sql="INSERT INTO categories (name, parent_id,description)
  VALUES
  ('$_POST[name]','$_POST[parent_id]','$_POST[description]')";
  
  if (!mysql_query($sql,$con))
    {
    die('Error: ' . mysql_error());
    }
  echo "1 record added";
  
  mysql_close($con)
  ?&gt;
  
  &lt;form action="ins.php" method="post"&gt;
  category: &lt;input type="text" name="name" /&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;
  parent: &lt;input type="text" name="parent_id" /&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;
  description: &lt;input type="text" name="description" /&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;
  
  &lt;input type="submit" /&gt;
  &lt;/form&gt;
  
  &lt;/body&gt;
  &lt;/html&gt;
  </code></pre>