Question

I am building a webpage in HTML with PHP and MySQL and I ran into trouble with swedish characters ÅÄÖ when running page. They show up as � instead of Å/Ä/Ö.

I have set the charset to UTF-8 in both HTML meta-tag and via PHP:

<?php
    header('Content-type: text/html; charset=UTF-8'); 
?> 

<meta charset="UTF-8">

Also, MySQL runs utf8_general_ci collation on all tables.

All files should also be encoded and saved as UTF-8 without Unicode Signature (BOM) and no normalization form.

All this have worked flawless before, but today, nomather what I try I do end up with � instead of Å/Ä/Ö. Is there a good way to debug this and find the problem?

Is any of my steps unnecessary or have I forgotten anything?

Answer 1

What you need from deceze’s article is the part regarding the SET NAMES:

mysql_set_charset('utf8', $connection); //not mysql_query("SET NAMES 'utf8'");

Just add that at the beginning of your php code, after the database connection was started