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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-31T05:54:10+00:00

In MySQL I have a string, which is displayed properly in phpmyadmin, with the

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In MySQL I have a string, which is displayed properly in phpmyadmin, with the collation set to utf8_general_ci .

In the PHP file, I have set the header using plain HTML:

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

The php files are hosted on Ubuntu, Apache 2.2, and the files are saved in UTF-8 without BOM (using Notepad++)

I have set the connection to use utf8:

@mysql_query("set names 'utf8'", $this->link);
$r = @mysql_query($query, $this->link);

it returns the string ( varchar 255 ) and using PHP echo , it is displayed to the browser.

However, I am still getting ????? instead of the actual words.

I can’t seem to be able to searched for what I might have missed, your help is much appreciated.

===== Edit =====

Database, table and column can have three different collations, I have set them all to utf8_general_ci , and calling mysql_set_charset(‘utf8’) immediately after the connection is made, have solved my problem.

I hope this will act as a useful checklist for future people bumping into the same problem. I for one may very well return in a few months to check if I have missed anything 🙂

Thanks all for the great input.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Be sure your table is in utf8_general_ci.
    Database and tables can have a different charset
    (can happen when you change it by yourself).

    And be careful with some functions, like htmlentities,
    which have a default charset parameter set to ISO-8859-1 for PHP <5.4.0
    (set to UTF-8 for PHP >5.4.0)

    http://php.net/manual/en/function.htmlentities.php

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