Question

I have set up a table in phpMyAdmin. I haven’t changed the charsets or anything. I inserted a text in a new row, and when I try to SELECT that row and output it with PHP, the letters ÆØÅ are displayed as ���, however if I try to edit the field in phpMyAdmin, the letters are displayed correctly. What do I do wrong that phpMyAdmin does correctly?

Answer 1

If your PHP file is already UTF-8 encoded, you should tell your database, that you need UTF-8. Instead of fiddling with the configurations of MySQL, just tell your connection object, which character-set you expect, the database does the rest for you.

This is an example for a mysqli connection object:

$db = new mysqli($dbHost, $dbUser, $dbPw, $dbName);
$db->set_charset("utf8");

Afterwards your queries will return UTF-8 encoded results.