Question

I call the Google geolocation service like this:

        $querystring = "http://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/geocode/json?sensor=false&latlng=".$row['lat'].",".$row['lng'];

        $context = stream_context_create(array(
            'http' => array(
                'timeout' => 10
            )
        ));

        $f = file_get_contents($querystring, 0, $context);
        $f = json_decode($f);

        if(!isset($f->status) || $f->status != 'OK') continue;

        $f = $f->results[0];
        $location = $f->formatted_address;

I then insert the location into the database:

        //add the location to the database
        $sql = "INSERT INTO `wp_postmeta`
            (`meta_id`, `post_id`, `meta_key`, `meta_value`)
            VALUES
            (
                NULL,
                '".intval($row['ID'])."',
                'location',
                '".mysql_real_escape_string($location)."'
            )";
        if($location)   $insert = mysql_query($sql);

The problem: Some characters are not well displayed when I edit the wordpress posts.
Like for example
“R. Hilário Riberio, 41-243 – Praça da Bandeira, Rio de Janeiro, 20270-180, Brazil”
should be
“R. Hilário Riberio, 41-243 – Praça da Bandeira, Rio de Janeiro, 20270-180, Brazil”

I use UTF-8 as character encoding on the website. But that’s irrelevant, because phpMyAdmin shows the data is entered into the database with the broken characters as well.

How do I set the right character encoding?

Answer 1

Use mysql_set_charset to set the database connection encoding to 'utf8', otherwise MySQL doesn’t know that you’re inserting UTF-8 encoded data. For more information, see Handling Unicode in a Web App.