PHP: UTF 8 characters encoding

Question

I am scraping a list of RSS feeds by using cURL, and then I am reading and parsing the RSS data with SimpleXML. The sorted data is then inserted into a mySQL database.

However, as notice on http://dansays.co.uk/research/MNA/rss.php I am having several issues with characters not displaying correctly.

Examples:

âGuitar Hero: Van Halenâ Trailer And Tracklist Available

NV 10/10/09 – Salt Lake City, UT 10/11/09 – Denver, CO 10/13/09 –

I have tried using htmlentities and htmlspecialchars on the data before inserting them into the database, but it doesn't seem to help resolve issue.

How could I possibly resolve this issue I am having?

Thanks for any advices.

Updated

I've tried what Greg suggested, and the issue is still here...

Here is the code I used to do SET NAMES in PDO:

$dbh = new PDO($dbstring, $username, $password); 

$dbh->setAttribute(PDO::ATTR_ERRMODE, PDO::ERRMODE_EXCEPTION); 

$dbh->query('SET NAMES "utf8"');

I did a bit of echo'ing with the simplexml data before it is sorted and inserted into the database, and I now believe it is something to do with the cURL...

Here is what I have for cURL:

$ch = curl_init($url);

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 0);

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_ENCODING, 'UTF-8');

$data = curl_exec($ch);

curl_close($ch);

$doc = new SimpleXmlElement($data, LIBXML_NOCDATA);

Issue Resolved

I had to set the content charset in the RSS/HTML page to "UTF-8" to resolve this issue. I guess this isn't a real fix as the char problems are still there in the raw data. Looking forward to proper support for it in PHP6!

Answer 1

Your page is being served as UTF-8 so I'd point my finger at the database.

Make sure the connection is in UTF-8 before any SELECTs or INSERTS - in MySQL:

SET NAMES "utf8"