Issue with utf-8 encoding using PHP + MySQL

try query

SET NAMES utf8

before any query in your application

Try setting the MySQL connection to UTF-8:

SET NAMES 'utf8'

And send explicit UTF-8 headers, just in case your server has some other default settings:

header('Content-type: text/html; charset=utf-8');

Put .htaccess file in your web-site root with content: AddDefaultCharset UTF-8

and

in your dbconfig set after connection to db:

mysql_query("SET NAMES 'utf8'");

You don't have to set your PHP and HTML files to utf-8.

You just have to set your output encoding to UTF-8 and the browser will display appropriately.

In HTML:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />

In PHP:

header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8');

When you get a string that is UTF-8 from the MySQL table, it will be UTF-8 all the way to browser output unless you convert the encoding. It's the way that the browser inteprets it.

Here is a fix. Set the header to header ('Content-type: text/html; charset=utf-8'); Then print your content using utf8_decode($content). You must have the two to make it work.

I found that on my server these had no effect:

ini_set('default_charset','utf-8');
mysql_set_charset('utf8');
header('Content-type: text/html; charset=utf-8');

But everything worked perfect once I added:

$mysqli->query("SET NAMES 'utf8'");

Note: I am using encoding utf8_general_ci, but utf8_unicode_ci works identically in my case.

Hope that helps.

I had this problem recently (I hope its the same problem you are having), I tried many ways but at the end what worked was really simple.

Convert your dumped SQL file to UTF-8 format and then import it.

BW: I used Notepad++ for the conversion.

When you show UTF8 characters on a website but tell the browser to interpret them as Latin1 (or Latin2) you see this kind of gibberish: ß

When you show Latin1 (or Latin2) characters on a website, but tell the browser to interpret them as UTF8, you see question marks.

So my guess is that you switched everything to UTF8 (I mean, you told the DB Engine, the web server and the browser you would be using UTF8), but you didn't actually convert the strings to UTF8.

Do what @Darkerstar said. Convert your dump to UTF8 (Notepad++ can do that easily) and import it again.