Question

The characters in the database are showing chinese characters but when queried from a phppage they show in special characters like ” ³Â³¯Àû ” ans not in chinese.

Answer 1

Does it show up in the right encoding when you manually override it in your browser? If so you might just need to set the appropriate encoding in your “Content-Type: …” HTTP header.

If you can’t change the encoding of the output and you need to force it to a specific encoding, you could use iconv – which is supported natively by PHP: http://php.net/manual/en/book.iconv.php

EDIT: just had a look, it looks like your data is encoded in ‘GB2312’. So what should work is:

$yourstring=iconv('GB2312','UTF-8',$yourstring);