Question

I’m trying out output a MySQL database field with PHP which contains em dash and en dash, but although the ROWs output, the values with these dashes do not.

As far as I am aware, these are characters which should be used in proper english, therefore I don’t think I should be stripping them out or replacing them with an alternative (like a hyphen).

By adding this code before the INSERT, I am able to get the em dash and en dash into the database properly (whereas without this line I saw unwanted characters instead):

mysql_query('SET NAMES utf8');

But, the value won’t output. The database table and it’s fields are using the utf8_general_ci collation and I’ve got these lines in my PHP page:

header('Content-type: text/html; charset=utf-8');
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />

I’m outputting the value like so:

echo nl2br(htmlentities(preg_replace("/[\r\n]+/", "\n\n", $row['someText'])));

If I output the value without formatting, I see this question mark character:

�

Does anyone know how to get around this? Am I forced to replace them with hyphens even though that’s grammatically incorrect, or is there a way to output them as they appear in the database?

Answer 1

I added the same MySQL command before retrieving data from the Db and this solved the issue.

mysql_query('SET NAMES utf8'); // Use utf-8

I don’t know why this is needed but I’ll investigate and see if I can make this a default.