broken UTF8 characters in MySQL using PHP

Question

I have noticed when dealing with some names that are not of normal spelling ie standard alphabet UK/US are getting lost from my inserting of a record to what actually shows up in the database. I have done quiet a bit of reading regarding the Collation type, which is what I thought was causing the issue, but not sure if this is the case or I'm still doing it wrong as my problem is still persisting.

Below is an example of a record I am creating as well as my database structure, and as you can also see the last_name field has "ö", when I lookup the record I actually see the last_name "Körner"

CREATE TABLE `data` (
  `id` bigint(20) NOT NULL,
  `profile_id` int(11) NOT NULL,
  `first_name` varchar(100) NOT NULL,
  `last_name` varchar(100) NOT NULL,
) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8;

ALTER TABLE `data`
  ADD PRIMARY KEY (`id`),
  ADD UNIQUE KEY `profile_id` (`profile_id`);

ALTER TABLE `data`
  MODIFY `id` bigint(20) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT;


INSERT IGNORE INTO data (profile_id, first_name, last_name) VALUES (1, 'Brent', 'Körner');

The field collation on the last_name is set to 'utf8_general_ci' which that I understand or should I say thought would sort this issue out.

This seems to be something I am doing wrong / missing with PHP, as when I execute the INSERT query within PhpMyAdmin it saves fine.

Answer 1

it seems the issue was down to PHP in the end, and i wasn't setting the charset.

For mysql

mysql_set_charset('utf8');

For mysqli

mysqli_set_charset('utf8');

ref https://akrabat.com/utf8-php-and-mysql/