php with special characters like ñ

Question

At first I thought the problem was when I return echo json_encode($row) from an ajax call that results with ñ are changed to NULL. But after testing I found out that the problem exists way before that.

In a sample php file with:

$test = "Nuñez"
echo $test

the result is just Nu�ez

I've searched around but none of the suggested solutions work. Like:

mb_internal_encoding('UTF-8');
mb_http_output('UTF-8');
mb_http_input('UTF-8');
mb_language('uni');
mb_regex_encoding('UTF-8');
ob_start('mb_output_handler');

or <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />, or header('content-type: text/html; charset: utf-8');. And some more solutions that I've already forgotten, believe me I tried a lot.

That's just the beginning of it, I'm hoping that won't be a problem with mysql since my database is in utf-8 so is my $mysqli charset. But I think I can't say the same for ajax json_encode. But nevermind, one problem at a time. Can anybody please help me. Thanks a lot!

PROBLEM SOLVED I just had to set "Encode in UTF-8" in Notepad++, as it was in "Encode in ANSI" before.

Answer 1

for me

$test = "Nuñez";
echo $test;

shows Nuñez

You may try

$test = "Nuñez";
echo utf8_decode($test);

or

$test = utf8_encode("Nuñez");
echo utf8_decode($test);

Answer 2

Try this

Its works for me.

$test = "Nuñez";

echo html_entity_decode(htmlentities($test));