I wrote an application using CakePHP.
I set everything to use UTF-8 encoding (the database tables, the database connection in database.php, etc.), now I’m wondering whether I should encode every single text string to UTF-8 (with utf8_encode) before sending it to the database or it isn’t necessary.
Thank you.
That isn’t necessary.
Specifying the database connection to utf8 will handle the complexities for you. (see comments)