Special characters issue in PHP

Question

I am working on a project where a user enters his info and I save it into database, a user posted a string in the form " I still am… ". But the string stored in database as " I still am… ".

Now I am wondering why this happened, by looking at the string it is cleared that the suffix used after am is a kind of special characters and is converted into … .

Answer 1

You have to set the UTF-8 as the connection to a database too. It is set to Windows 1252 by default. (This encoding is often incorrectly labelled ISO 8859-1.)

The bytes E2 80 A6 are rendered as … in UTF-8 and as … in Windows 1252. The PHP is most of the time unaware of an encoding and pass raw bytes.