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It is needed whenever you want to send data to the server having characters that cannot be represented in pure ASCII, like 'ñ' or 'ö'.
That if the MySQL instance is not configured to expect UTF-8 encoding by default from client connections (many are, depending on your location and platform.)
Read http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html in case you aren't aware how Unicode works.
Read Whether to use "SET NAMES" to see SET NAMES alternatives and what exactly is it about.
From the manual:
SET NAMES indicates what character set the client will use to send SQL statements to the server.
More elaborately, (and once again, gratuitously lifted from the manual):
SET NAMES indicates what character set the client will use to send SQL statements to the server. Thus, SET NAMES 'cp1251' tells the server, “future incoming messages from this client are in character set cp1251.” It also specifies the character set that the server should use for sending results back to the client. (For example, it indicates what character set to use for column values if you use a SELECT statement.)
Getting encoding right is really tricky - there are too many layers:
The SQL command "SET CHARSET utf8" from PHP will ensure that the client side (PHP) will get the data in utf8, no matter how they are stored in the database. Of course, they need to be stored correctly first.
Encoding defined for a table/column doesn't really mean that the data are in that encoding. If you happened to have a table defined as utf8 but stored as differtent encoding, then MySQL will treat them as utf8 and you're in trouble. Which means you have to fix this first.
You need to check in what encoding the data flow at each layer.
If you receive data in e.g. windows-1250, and want to store in utf-8, then use this SQL before storing:
SET NAMES 'cp1250';
If you have data in DB as windows-1250 and want to retreive utf8, use:
SET CHARSET 'utf8';
This query should be written before the query which create or update data in the database, this query looks like :
mysql_query("set names 'utf8'");
Note that you should write the encode which you are using in the header for example if you are using utf-8 you add it like this in the header or it will couse a problem with Internet Explorer
so your page looks like this
<html>
<head>
<title>page title</title>
<meta charset="UTF-8" />
</head>
<body>
<?php
mysql_query("set names 'utf8'");
$sql = "INSERT * FROM ..... ";
mysql_query($sql);
?>
</body>
</html>
The solution is
$conn->set_charset("utf8");
Instead of doing this via an SQL query use the php function: mysqli::set_charset mysqli_set_charset
Note: This is the preferred way to change the charset. Using mysqli_query() to set it (such as SET NAMES utf8) is not recommended.See the MySQL character set concepts section for more information.
from http://www.php.net/manual/en/mysqli.set-charset.php
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