Special characters in PHP / MySQL

Question

Hi, I have in the database words that include special character (in Spanish mostly, like tildes). In the database everything is saved and shown correctly with PHPmyAdmin, but when I get the data (using PHP) and display it in a browser, I get a weird character, like a "?" with a square... I need a general fix so I don't need to escape each character every time, and also I would be able to insert special Spanish characters from a PHP form into the database...

The HTML is correct:

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

All tables and databas are set to utf8_spanish

The character I get: �

Any suggestions???

Thanks!!!

Answer 1

Turn on unicode encoding in your HTML.

Answer 2

You probably need to set the content-type header properly:

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

This question may also help.

Answer 3

Issue SET NAMES 'utf8' right after connecting:

$mysqli = new mysqli("localhost", "user", "password", "database");
$mysqli->query("SET NAMES 'utf8'");

Answer 4

Have MySQL translate it automatically

$conn = mysql_connect('host', 'user', 'password');
mysql_set_charset('utf8',$conn);

http://es.php.net/manual/en/function.mysql-set-charset.php

EDIT: from your comment I gather, that this is actually encoded in latin1 so

mysql_set_charset('latin1_spanish_ci',$conn);

Answer 5

When dealing with special characters I always take care of the following:

• Database, table and field character sets are all set to utf8_general_* or utf8_unicode_*
• I make sure my editor saves PHP files with the right character set
• I set default_charset in php.ini to UTF-8 or
• I send a Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8 header
• The charset in the META tag is UTF-8 (this is overriden by the Content-Type HTTP header)
• When connecting to MySQL I issue the following queries:
  • SET NAMES utf8
  • SET CHARACTER SET utf8
  • SET COLLATION_CONNECTION="utf8_general_ci"/"utf8_general_ci"

Answer 6

I'd just like ro provide some more details on the solution proposed by vartec which is (depending on your MySQL installation) the most correct soultion to your problem. First of all the character set / encoding issue in MySQL is a somehow complex subject which is extensively covered in the MySQL manual Chapter 9.1 "Character Set Support". In your case especially 9.1.4. "Connection Character Sets and Collations" will be most relevant.

To make it short: MySQL must know which character set / encoding your client application (talking from the database persoective that's your PHP script) is expecting as it'll transcode all the string data from the internal character set / encoding defined at server-, database-, table- or column-level into the connection character set / encoding. You're using UTF-8 on the client side so must tell MySQL that you use UTF-8. This is done by the MySQL command SET NAMES 'utf8' which must be send as the first query on opening a connection. Depending on your installation and on the MySQL client library you use in the PHP script this can be done automatically on each connect.

If you use PDO it's just a matter of setting a configuration parameter

$db = new PDO($dsn, $user, $password);
$db->setAttribute(PDO::MYSQL_ATTR_INIT_COMMAND, "SET NAMES 'utf8'");

I hope that will help to make the whole thing more understandable.

EDIT:

Using mysqli changing the client character set / encoding is even more simple:

$mysqli = new mysqli("localhost", "user", "password", "db");
$mysqli->set_charset("utf8");

Answer 7

Are you sure you have UTF8 data in your database to begin with?

Answer 8

Changed the HTML charset to ISO-8859-1 fixed the problem! Silly

Answer 9

holy crap.. this was driving me insane. i was trying to do the same thing. i added a utf-8 encoding HTML header.. mysqli_set_charset() saved me, hours later, but I am glad I have it working now

another function to try for encoding special characters and accents is htmlentities()

Answer 10

mysql_set_charset worked for me. thank you so much

Answer 11

thank you so much, working fine