php using utf8 without utf_encode

Question

i'm running a german website which gets content from a mysql database. i've defined the charset as utf8 as following:

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

the problem is, when fetching + displaying contents from the database i always need to use utf8_encode in order to get the proper german "umlauts".

i want to maintain the utf8 charset for my web as i'll have to add more languages which have special characters.

any ideas on how to 1:1 echo database contents without having to utf8_encode?

thanks

The common troubleshooting list: Handling Unicode Front To Back In A Web App — deceze
– deceze ♦, Commented Jun 28, 2012 at 15:30

jeroen · Accepted Answer · 2012-06-28 15:29:06Z

2

Hard to tell without seeing how you are connecting to your database, but a common problem is the database connection itself.

After opening / selecting the database you need to set:

$db->exec('SET CHARACTER SET utf8');    // PDO

mysql_set_charset('utf8');    // Deprecated mysql_* extension

answered Jun 28, 2012 at 15:29

jeroen

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Attila Szeremi · Accepted Answer · 2012-06-28 15:28:00Z

1

Whenever I want to use utf-8 with PHP and MySQL, I found that usually these two functions are the ones you should use after mysql_connect():

mysql_set_charset('utf8', $link);
mysql_query('SET NAMES utf8', $link);

answered Jun 28, 2012 at 15:28

Attila Szeremi

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bcmcfc · Accepted Answer · 2012-06-28 15:25:53Z

0

Setting the content type in the header may do the trick:

header('content-type: text/html; charset=utf-8');

answered Jun 28, 2012 at 15:25

bcmcfc

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Community · Accepted Answer · 2017-05-23 11:48:52Z

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I had a similar problem and i solve adding this in the beginning of my PHP file:

ini_set('default_charset', 'UTF-8');
mb_internal_encoding('UTF-8');

Additionally, is very important to check if you are saving your PHP file in UTF-8 format without BOM, i had a big headache with this. I recomend Notepad++, it shows the current file encoding and allow you to convert to UTF-8 without BOM if necessary.

If you would like to see my problem and solution, it is here.

Hope it can help you!

edited May 23, 2017 at 11:48

CommunityBot

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answered Jun 28, 2012 at 18:41

Marcio Mazzucato

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