Question

I’m working on a French language site built in CakePHP. I have tried multiple functions to try and convert the text into UTF-8 and display properly, but have had no success so far – any accented letters are displaying as a black diamond with a question mark. They do display correctly when I change the char set in the browser to ISO-8859-1, but I’d like to make the while site UTF-8 compliant. I have used:

html_entity_decode($string, ENT_QUOTES, ‘UTF-8’);
htmlspecialchars($string, ENT_QUOTES, ‘UTF-8’);
utf8_encode

but no cigar. The page is set to UTF-8 in the header

And the MySQL database is using UTF-8 too. How can I get the accented characters to display properly in UTF-8?

Answer 1

Check your @@character_set_results. By default, MySQL uses latin1, not utf8. Try SET NAMES utf8 or mysqli::set_charset.

Update: here is how you might check the character sets in use:

mysql> SHOW VARIABLES LIKE '%char%';
+--------------------------+----------------------------+
| Variable_name            | Value                      |
+--------------------------+----------------------------+
| character_set_client     | utf8                       | 
| character_set_connection | utf8                       | 
| character_set_database   | utf8                       | 
| character_set_filesystem | binary                     | 
| character_set_results    | utf8                       | 
| character_set_server     | utf8                       | 
| character_set_system     | utf8                       | 
| character_sets_dir       | /usr/share/mysql/charsets/ | 
+--------------------------+----------------------------+

Read more on dev.mysql.com.