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Asked: 2026-06-08T22:05:33+00:00

Some rows in my database contain an apostrophe of sorts, that, when displayed with

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Some rows in my database contain an apostrophe of sorts, that, when displayed with PHP, are converted to diamonds with a question mark in the center. Example, if it copies correctly: Captain Jim O’Brien

These “apostrophes” were inserted most likely via TinyMCE, where the user was copying and pasting from Word, or something from a Mac computer perhaps.

How can I display these “apostrophes”? When I view the row in PHPMyAdmin, the apostrophes are displayed (no diamond), so there is obviously a way.

My character encoding is set to UTF-8, and I’ve tried htmlspecialchars($string) and htmlentities($string), with no luck.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Characters are encoded in different places.

    MySQL has a particular character encoding. By default, it is not UTF-8 but rather latin1.

    The HTML document you generate using PHP also has a particular character encoding specified. Finally, the actual bytes in the HTML document factually assume a particular character encoding, which if you’re not careful can be different than the character encoding you specify for the document.

    Verify that your MySQL encoding is set to UTF-8 as a first step. Note that MySQL can have the default character encoding for the database overridden on a per-table or even per-column basis.

    You may be interested in this related post to get a deeper understanding of character encoding

    Character Encoding and the ’ Issue

    Update

    Something put the data into the MySQL database in the first place. Perhaps that “something” was not using UTF-8 encoding.

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