Foreign characters turn into garbage in mysql

Question

I am in the U.S. I have the following line in my web page:

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

And my MYSQL table is MyISAM latin1_swedish_ci

But when someone fills out a form with a foreign character it gets stored in MySql as garbage. An example would be an e with accent over it, etc. - something not normally used in American English. Even if someone uses a weird apostrophe, its get turned into garbage:

nation's

gets turned into:

nation’s

I'm using a regular apostrophe there but you get the idea. Foreign characters turn into 3 garbage characters. Please help! TIA

Answer 1

Either change your document's header to

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />

or - better - change your tables' character set to UTF-8. To do that is not entirely trivial, just changing the tables' collation won't do the trick. This SO question might give some pointers.