I'm working on a French language site built in CakePHP. I have tried multiple functions to try and convert the text into UTF-8 and display properly, but have had no success so far - any accented letters are displaying as a black diamond with a question mark. They do display correctly when I change the char set in the browser to ISO-8859-1, but I'd like to make the while site UTF-8 compliant. I have used:
html_entity_decode($string, ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8');
htmlspecialchars($string, ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8');
utf8_encode
but no cigar. The page is set to UTF-8 in the header
And the MySQL database is using UTF-8 too. How can I get the accented characters to display properly in UTF-8?
Check your @@character_set_results. By default, MySQL uses latin1, not utf8. Try SET NAMES utf8 or mysqli::set_charset.
Update: here is how you might check the character sets in use:
mysql> SHOW VARIABLES LIKE '%char%';
+--------------------------+----------------------------+
| Variable_name | Value |
+--------------------------+----------------------------+
| character_set_client | utf8 |
| character_set_connection | utf8 |
| character_set_database | utf8 |
| character_set_filesystem | binary |
| character_set_results | utf8 |
| character_set_server | utf8 |
| character_set_system | utf8 |
| character_sets_dir | /usr/share/mysql/charsets/ |
+--------------------------+----------------------------+
Read more on dev.mysql.com.
First: Check your php files encoding! I work on Mac, I use Coda to program, and it has an option to convert charset's, sometimes i get troubles like this and converting to UTF-8 always fix them. I think that Notepad++ can do that on windows. (If you do this on your PHP files, every strings on them will not need the functions htmlspecialchars(), html_entity_decode, etc )
Second: if you are using HTML Output, check if you have <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" /> on your header...
Third: Do what @janmoesen said on your MySQL DB.
Tell me something about that.
I just fixed a very similar problem with accented characters not displaying. My database table is utf-8 encoded and my html header is correctly set for utf-8.
I hadn't specified a charset for my MySQL connection, in my case I'm using PDO.
$this->pdo = new PDO("mysql:host=$host;dbname=$dbname;charset=utf8;", $username, $password);
No problems now!
In case this helps anyone using PHP Classes.
My solution was to set Character Encoding to my Connection.
//connect to MySQL and select DB
public function open_connection() {
$this->connection = new mysqli( DB_SERVER, DB_USER, DB_PASS, DB_NAME );
if ( !$this->connection ) {
die( "Database connection failed: " . mysqli_error() );
}
mysqli_set_charset($this->connection,"utf8");
}
