Character encoding problem in PHP and MySQL

Question

When I run a query directly in MySQL using phpMyAdmin it allows – (long dash, not normal -), but when I run this query from my PHP code, it turns them to –.

If you encode – it'll come %E2%80%93 (in JavaScript). %E2 becomes â, %80 becomes € and %93 becomes “. I don't understand when I run the query in phpMyAdmin it shaves data as –, but when I run the query in my PHP code, then it does not work in the way I want.

Answer 1

Maybe phpMyAdmin engine escapes long dash to normal dash ?

Answer 2

Which character encoding do you use in your table? After connecting to the DB in php try to run this:

mysql_query('SET NAMES utf8'); //if you use utf-8

Answer 3

Probably you are missing to put the met tag on your HTML, have you write the next line in the head of your HTML document?

<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />

Otherwise, the browser interprets it as ISO-8859-1.

You should use the same encoding everywhere, on your database, on your connection and on your html document.

For ensure you have a utf-8 table, run the next statement, and check it says CHARSET=utf8 almost at the end.

 SHOW CREATE TABLE tableName;