Question

Problem:

When I retrieve values from MySQL table to my PHP Zend Framework-application, the characters ä and ö are returned from the database to my browser like this �.

Any ideas where the problem might occur? I have tried setting some properties to UTF-8, but still this occurs…I think I have still missed something.

Could you give some solutions how I can get rid of this for sure? What configs I need to set etc.

Thank you 🙂

Answer 1

When characters of the wrong encoding are read to the browser, they come up as � or ?. There is an encoding mismatch somewhere:

• In your browser
• In the database table collation
• In the HTML charset

Those characters would work in Unicode UTF-8, so you should verify that your DB table collation is utf8_bin or similar, as, if you want to store everything in UTF-8 Swedish, you might use utf8_swedish_ci

In your browser, ensure that your content encoding is set to auto-detect.

To create a UTF-8 / utf8_bin table in MySQL, here is an example:

CREATE TABLE `sample` (
  `id` int(11) unsigned NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
  PRIMARY KEY (`id`)
) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8 COLLATE=utf8_bin;

To ALTER an existing table to use UTF-8, use the following command:

ALTER TABLE table_name CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_bin;

This post has a good explanation of whether or not to use CONVERT TO CHRACTER SET utf8

Note CHARSET and COLLATE must both be set, otherwise you will automatically get COLLATE=utf8_general_ci

For HTML, charset can be set using:

<meta charset="UTF-8">