Charset of Apache (XAMPP) Server

Question

I run a XAMPP Apache PHP Server on my Mac and I am facing the following problem: German special characters like ä ö ü and ß are displayed with strange questiontags instead of the correct symbol. I assume a misconfiguration of the server, since the files are all saved in UTF-8 and contain

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

In the -Tag of the files.

Anyone an idea how to get rid of those � ? I thought already of the httpd.conf , but there is already something like

#UTF 8
AddDefaultCharset utf-8

in it. The php.ini also includes

default_charset = "utf-8“

I really dont know how to proceed and my whole page looks not as nice as it should with those strange question tags...

Thanks for your Help! Tim

Answer 1

I was having the same problem on my XAMPP local server and none of those things worked for me. The problem was in the transfer of data between mySQL (where all my foreign language looked good) and the server (where everything seemed good too). I was just missing this one statement in my.ini "character_set_server=utf8" which seems to affect data communication beetween server and mySQL DON't change any other UTF-8 statements at the same time!