Very strange behaviour with UTF-8 [duplicate]

This question already has an answer here:

UTF-8 all the way through 13 answers

How can I echo a sql text field into a paragraph?

My code does puts the text in but changes the accents like á to this -> �. I tried adding UTF-8 in the header and removing it.

Removing UTF-A makes the sql content is ok but all the content outside the paragraph messes up.

I checked the DB was using (UTF-8-unicode), The files were saved with UTF-8

Any ideas on what might be wrong?

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

<textarea class="texto" name="textoarticulo"  id="textoarticulo" form="formarticulo" placeholder="Texto del art&iacute;culo...">
 <?
    echo $row['txt4'];

 ?>
</textarea>

It's important that your entire code has the same charset to avoid issues where characters displays incorrectly.

Here's a little list of things that has to be set to a specific charset.

Headers

Setting the charset in both HTML and PHP headers to UTF-8
- PHP (PHP headers has to be placed before any output: PHP echo, whitespace, HTML!):
```
header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8');
```
- HTML (HTML-headers are placed within the <head> / </head> tag):
```
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
```

Connection

You also need to specify the charset in the connection itself.
- PDO (specified in the object itself):
```
$handler = new PDO('mysql:host=localhost;dbname=database;charset=utf8', 'username', 'password');
```
- MySQLi: (placed directly after creating the connection, $mysqli is the connection object)
```
$mysqli->set_charset("utf8"); // OOP style
mysqli_set_charset($mysqli, "utf8"); // procedural style
```
- MySQL (depricated): (placed directly after creating the connection)
```
mysql_set_charset("utf8");
```

Database

Your database and its tables has to be set to UTF-8. Note that charset is not the same as collation.

You can do that by running the queries below once for each database and tables (for example in phpMyAdmin)
```
ALTER DATABASE databasename CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci;
ALTER TABLE tablename CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci;
```
Caution... There are various different situations that need different ALTERs. Details Here . Doing the wrong ALTER is likely to make things worse. -- Rick James

php.ini specification

In your php.ini file, you should specify the default charset for your platform, like this
```
default_charset = "utf-8";
```
(This is in essence the same as doing header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8'); on all pages)

File-encoding

It's also important that the .php file itself is UTF-8 encoded. If you're using Notepad++ to write your code, this can be done in the "Format" drop-down on the taskbar. You should use UTF-8 w/o BOM.

Should you follow all of the pointers above, chances are your problem will be solved. If not, you can take a look at this StackOverflow post: UTF-8 all the way through.