I’m having trouble getting my PHP application to work properly with UTF-8 characters when connecting to MySQL database. Every time I try to insert or retrieve data with special characters like accented letters or symbols, they show up as question marks or weird characters.
I’ve tried setting various charset options but nothing seems to work consistently. Can someone share a complete working example that handles UTF-8 encoding correctly from start to finish? I need something that covers the database connection, inserting data, and displaying it back without any character corruption.
What are the essential steps to make sure everything works with international characters? I’m looking for a reliable approach that won’t break when users enter non-English text.
check your html meta tag too - needs to be <meta charset="UTF-8"> or it won’t display right in the browser. also mysqli_set_charset('utf8mb4', $connection) after connecting helped me a lot when pdo wasn’t an option.
You’ve got a charset mismatch between your database, connection, and PHP output. I hit this same issue with multilingual content - everything needs to match up perfectly. Set your MySQL database and tables to utf8mb4 collation. It handles full Unicode, including emojis and complex characters. For your PDO connection, add charset=utf8mb4 to your DSN string and set PDO::MYSQL_ATTR_INIT_COMMAND to ‘SET NAMES utf8mb4’. In PHP, add header(‘Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8’) at the top of your scripts. Save your PHP files as UTF-8 without BOM. Here’s the catch - corrupted data won’t magically fix itself. You’ll probably need to clean your database and re-import everything to see the changes take effect.