errr im not sure if my question's title is clear enough but i'll try my best to explain
i really am not sure about how php executes the function mysql_query in terms of retrieval and storage
of strings, does it recognize any character set encodings used in the table?
and does my browser by default overrides any character encodings sent through <forms> meaning if i put 'ëä' in any <input> or <textarea> will these characters be sent as they are?
next, how would php handle these characters? can i force php to write these characters as they are into the database?
knowing how i made my database tables, and their corresponding collations, how could i force php to return the correct string values that were in the database?
hehe sorry for being too lazy to google, but i ran through this problem before in another table and thought i found a solution but i was thinking that maybe i just ticked my broswer's options to use by default a utf-8 encoding? okay so in this case then the user's browser really has power over what type of character encoding they would use to render a page... are there any workarounds?