Spanish Characters Not Encoding Correctly

Question

I'm working on a project in the Philippines where many people have special Latin tilde characters in their names.

I have a database set up with all tables in latin1 with latin1_swedish_ci collation.

+--------------------------+--------------------------------+
| Variable_name            | Value                          |
+--------------------------+--------------------------------+
| character_set_client     | latin1                         |
| character_set_connection | latin1                         |
| character_set_database   | latin1                         |
| character_set_filesystem | binary                         |
| character_set_results    | latin1                         |
| character_set_server     | latin1                         |
| character_set_system     | utf8                           |
| character_sets_dir       | C:\xampp\mysql\share\charsets\ |
+--------------------------+--------------------------------+

My webpage headers declare iso-8859-1 as the character set.

When I submit an employee name containing a tilde character through my web forms, for example, it appears in my table as 'Marie Cañon' and appears the same on my webpages when I look at the employee's record.

If I change the webpage encoding to utf-8, it displays correctly as 'Marie Cañon'. So, I'm assuming that somehow I'm encoding UTF-8 in my latin1 tables. But I'm confused where that could be occurring.

As far as I know, PDO doesn't deal with encoding. My webpages are declared iso-8859-1, so I'm figuring PHP isn't causing the problem. My character_set_connection is latin1 in MySQL.

Where could this be happening?

Additional Information: Ubuntu 10.04.2 LTS MySQL 5.1.41-3ubuntu12.9-log PHP5: 5.3.2 Apache2: 2.2.14

Answer 1

This worked for me:

$title = mb_convert_encoding($article['title'], "UTF-8", "iso-8859-1");

for Spanish accents