Save Accents in MySQL Database

Question

I'm trying to save French accents in my database, but they aren't saved like they should in the DB.
For example, a "é" is saved as "é".
I've tried to set my files to "Unicode (utf-8)", the fields in the DB are "utf8_general_ci" as well as the DB itself.
When I look at my data posted through AJAX with Firebug, I see the accent passed as "é", so it's correct.

Thanks and let me know you need more info!

Answer 1

Personally I solved the same issue by adding after the MySQL connection code:

mysql_set_charset("utf8"); 

or for mysqli:

mysqli_set_charset($conn, "utf8"); 

or the mysqli OOP equivalent:

$conn->set_charset("utf8"); 

And sometimes you'll have to define the main php charset by adding this code:

mb_internal_encoding('UTF-8'); 

On the client HTML side you have to add the following header data :

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

In order to use JSON AJAX results (e.g. by using jQuery), you should define the header by adding :

header("Content-type: application/json;charset=utf8"); json_encode(      some_data ); 

This should do the trick

Answer 2

The best bet is that your database connection is not UTF-8 encoded - it is usually ISO-8859-1 by default.

Try sending a query

SET NAMES utf8; 

after making the connection.