Hello,
The database has a ton of entries that were not escaped because they were inputted manually when they were inserted so they look like: Don't inside of the entry, but when I try to display them they have a weird characters when I output in PHP. Before I would put anything into the database I would usually use mysqli_real_escape_string and then do the same when I go to retrieve the data, but since the data is already stored without using real_escape how do I display it properly?
The character being displayed instead of the single quotes looks like this: �
If it helps the data is stored as 'text'.
Thanks!
For future users of the same problem here's the steps:
- Check your website headers to see what the encoding is
- Check your mysql table columns and make sure they match.
- If they don't change them to match. utf8_general in mysql and utf8 in my HTML worked for me
- You will have to go back through the old mysql tables and update them so the new encoding is set properly.
- New entries should work fine
- When you output your results in PHP (or I guess whatever language you use), depending on if you are using any validation, you may have to use mysqli_real_escape_string or a similar function, such as stripslashes()