Question

I am querying a server for some information (returned as JSON), inter alia a list of names, and one of those names returns containing weird characters:

Ðемања Матејић

This is how it should be:

Немања Матејић

I have tried the following:

• Remove the BOM (byte-order mark) from the string (or else PHP won’t decode the JSON), then decode it using json_decode and directly take the name and insert it into my UTF8-encoded MySQL database.
• Using a field with a UTF8 collation.

… to no avail – the value in the database still remains flawed.

How to solve this?

Edit:

Running SHOW VARIABLES LIKE '%character%' returns

character_set_client    utf8
character_set_connection    utf8
character_set_database  utf8
character_set_filesystem    binary
character_set_results   utf8
character_set_server    latin1
character_set_system    utf8
character_sets_dir  /data/mysql/fuentez/share/mysql/charsets/

Is it possibly because character_set_server is latin1?

Answer 1

You stored the data in the database as latin1 instead of UTF-8.

For example the string е encoded as latin1 becomes 0xd0 0xb5 which is the UTF-8 encoding of the Cyrillic letter е.