Question

In my PHP page, product descriptions are showing up with the infamous £ issue.

Aha! I thought – I must remember to move the entire website over to UTF-8. So I:

• Specified in both the mysql_set_charset('utf8'); and the array(PDO::MYSQL_ATTR_INIT_COMMAND => "SET NAMES utf8") command. I’m migrating the website over to PDO – so still in a transitional process. The actual part of the website where the product description is saved and read both use the new PDO method.
• Specified ini_set('default_charset', 'utf-8'); at the start of my header.php page.
• Specified <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=utf-8" /> in the head tag of the HTML page. I verified that there were no caching issues by checking that it appears.
• Changed the collation of the products table to utf8_general_ci.

But the error still occurs. It even occurs on new products and when I edit the product to remove and re-add the pound sign. Is there anything I’m missing?

Answer 1

I found the problem. I was throwing htmlentities() onto the strings for security when I was echoing them to the browser. I should have thrown:

htmlentities($string, ENT_COMPAT | ENT_HTML401, "UTF-8"); to rectify this.