Question

I copy pasted a certain paragraph from another site and the outcome had question marks in it such as

animal�ideally 

My server is set to iso-8859-1 apparently and my meta tag is saying set charset to utf-8.

I have never worked with charsets and don’t know what it is besides what I’ve been researching about it.

If I exit the content out of the database or directly upon submission it contains the ? marks. What is the procedure or course of action I must take to make these question marks disappear?

REading other posts said in mysql_query do

   mysql_query("SET NAMES 'UTF8');

I did that, and it still didn’t help.

What do I do ? Thank you.

Answer 1

to show UTF8 characters in your page you need to set the charset for your page:

<meta charset="utf-8">

if you want to save such characters into database, database be UTF8 also:

CREATE TABLE foo
(
   id INT UNSIGNED PRIMARY KEY AUTO_INCREMENT,
   ...
 ) CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci

you’ll also need to set the php for utf8: (at top)

header("Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8\n");