Zend DB and encoding

Question

I have just encountered something rather strange, I use the Zend Framework 1.10 with the Zend_Db_Table module to read some data from a databse. The database itself, the table and the fields in question all have their collation set to "utf8_general_ci" and all special chars appear correctly formatted in the DB when checked with phpMyAdmin. Also, saving with Zend_Db_Table works just fine, yet when I read the data and just echo it to my browser it is returned as ISO-8859-1, not as UTF8. I noticed the same thing when trying to use json_encode (which only works with UTF8 strings as input) on a value returned from the DB.

How can I set that Zend_Db_Table/Zend_Db_Row should always work with UTF8 and return me an UTF8 value? I have not set anything regarding encoding in my app yet.

Thanks a lot for your help!

Answer 1

Just note. In my case this one helped:

    $this->db = new Zend_Db_Adapter_Pdo_Mysql(array(
        'host'     => $config['db_hostname'],
        'username' => $config['db_username'],
        'password' => $config['db_password'],
        'dbname'   => $config['db_database'],
        'charset'  => 'utf8'
    ));