Previous issue - was not able to store non-english characters:
How to store non-english characters?
That was fixed by using UTF8. But realized today that symbols like ♥☆ are not stored correctly. They get converted to characters like ♥☆.
How can this be fixed?
Is UTF8 used consistently across the whole spectrum (MySQL, PHP, Apache, <meta>s, headers..)?
For me this worked out of the box:
$query = "update tbl set col = '♥☆' where id = 1";
mysql_query($query) or die(mysql_error());
$query = "select col from tbl where id = 1";
$res = mysql_query($query) or die(mysql_error());
print_r(mysql_fetch_row($res));
Debug output:
Content-type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Array
(
[0] => ♥☆
)
It looks to me like they're being stored correctly, but that you're not interpreting them correctly when you read them out. ♥ and ☆ are going to end up as multibyte characters in UTF-8 encoding. I'll bet if you look up that multibyte encoding, you'll see it's the same as the single-byte encoding for ♥ and ☆ respectively.
Edit: adding details.
As you can see in the following table, interpreting the UTF-8 characters as if they were encoded as Windows Latin-1 gives the results you're seeing.
UTF-8 character Hex
♥ e2 99 a5
☆ e2 98 86
Windows Latin-1 Hex
â e2
™ 99
¥ a5
˜ 98
† 86
