Question

I get an UTF-8 string from db, and trying to echo its first character:

$title = $model->title;
echo $title[0];

I get: �

What’s wrong?

Answer 1

There are several things you need to consider:

1. Check that data in the DB is being stored as UTF-8
2. Check that the client connection to the DB is in UTF-8 (for example, in mysql see: http://www.php.net/manual/en/mysqli.character-set-name.php)
3. Make sure that the page has it’s content-type set as UTF-8 [you can use header('Content-Type: utf-8'); ]
4. Try setting the internal encoding, using mb_internal_encoding("UTF-8");
5. Use mb_substr instead of array index notation