PHP charset有问题

Question

I don't usually have issues on charset, but this one I'm not getting where the problem is.

function categories($host, $user, $pw, $bd){
    $file_handle = fopen("categories.csv", "rb");

    $mysqli = new mysqli($host, $user, $pw, $bd);
    $mysqli->set_charset('utf8');

    while (!feof($file_handle) ) {
        $line_of_text = fgets($file_handle);
        $parts = explode(';', $line_of_text);

        $description = $parts[1];
        $parent = $parts[2];

        $query = $mysqli->prepare("INSERT INTO categories (`description`, parent) VALUES(?, ?)");
        $query->bind_param("si", $description, $parent);
        $query->execute();
    }
    fclose($file_handle);   
}

I do have the same code for others files, like countries, etc and I have no problem with charset. As you can see I use, as always, the $mysqli->set_charset('utf8'); code. If I echo the $description variable I do get the right characters (they are mostly portuguese).

This is what I've tried so far:

$query = $mysqli->prepare("SET NAMES 'utf8'"); // inside the function
$query->execute();

header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8'); // in the top of the page

But it continues to add in the database words like: Feij?o (Feijão), Ch?s (Chás).

I do find this stupid because I do insert in another table, like I said, countries names with accents without any problem.

Any guess?

Edit: Solved, using utf8_encode.

$query->bind_param("si", utf8_encode($description), $parent);

Answer 1

The problem probably is in file "categories.csv", which could not be UTF-8...

To convert the file from "ASCII" to UTF-8 you could use

iconv -f WINDOWS-1252 -t UTF-8 categories.csv