Question

I’m pulling some content from my database and when I display it, I am getting some random characters occasionally dispersed throughout the content. I am seeing a lot of  where spaces were/are. I’m also getting ’ in some places.

The characters don’t appear when I view in phpMyAdmin. How do I encode the content correctly? Is it something I should do BEFORE I insert the content or is it something I do when I am displaying?

Answer 1

What character set is the data stored in?

For example, if the data is stored as UTF-8, then when displaying the data, you need to make sure the page encoding is set to UTF-8 as well.

If it is stored in some other character set, then set the page encoding as appropriate.

You can do this by passing appropriate headers:

Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8

Or letting the browser know in your document:

<META http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset="utf-8">

And in HTML5:

<meta charset="utf-8" />