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Asked: 2026-05-26T02:37:54+00:00

My mother language uses accents and I usually use the utf8_encode to utf8_decode function

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My mother language uses accents and I usually use the utf8_encode to utf8_decode function in php to avoid problems.

Now I’ve a MySql field of type varchar (utf8_bin) and another of type longtext (utf8_bin).
Varchar returns odd characters, while longtext works good.

Is there a difference between the way they’re managed by php?

$a = "Início";
echo utf8_encode($a)."<br>";
echo utf8_decode($a);

Using MySql field of type varchar I get

Início
In�cio

Using MySql field of type text or longtext I get

Início

witch is the correct output I need.
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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Are you setting the mySQL charset before running your SQL to fetch the text? With regards to the character encoding issues, see here, did you convert the field encoding when there was already content in the fields?

    Unfortunately, a direct conversion like that can mangle the text in
    the database and make it unreadable, especially if there are actual
    international characters (i.e. non-latin languages). The reasons for
    this distortion are complicated and hard to understand, but the result
    is that each column must be converted twice

    […]

    As you can see we first convert the LONGTEXT column to its blob-type
    counterpart: LONGBLOB. Once this is complete, we convert it back to
    LONGTEXT, but with our desired character set of utf8;.

    It sounds like you’re pretty au fait with general encoding issues, though check here if not.

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