Problems displaying French accented characters in UTF-8

Question

I'm working on a French language site built in CakePHP. I have tried multiple functions to try and convert the text into UTF-8 and display properly, but have had no success so far - any accented letters are displaying as a black diamond with a question mark. They do display correctly when I change the char set in the browser to ISO-8859-1, but I'd like to make the while site UTF-8 compliant. I have used:

html_entity_decode($string, ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8'); htmlspecialchars($string, ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8'); utf8_encode

but no cigar. The page is set to UTF-8 in the header

And the MySQL database is using UTF-8 too. How can I get the accented characters to display properly in UTF-8?

Answer 1

Check your @@character_set_results . By default, MySQL uses latin1 , not utf8 . Try SET NAMES utf8 or mysqli::set_charset .

Update: here is how you might check the character sets in use:

mysql> SHOW VARIABLES LIKE '%char%';
+--------------------------+----------------------------+
| Variable_name            | Value                      |
+--------------------------+----------------------------+
| character_set_client     | utf8                       | 
| character_set_connection | utf8                       | 
| character_set_database   | utf8                       | 
| character_set_filesystem | binary                     | 
| character_set_results    | utf8                       | 
| character_set_server     | utf8                       | 
| character_set_system     | utf8                       | 
| character_sets_dir       | /usr/share/mysql/charsets/ | 
+--------------------------+----------------------------+

Read more on dev.mysql.com .

Answer 2

First: Check your php files encoding! I work on Mac, I use Coda to program, and it has an option to convert charset's, sometimes i get troubles like this and converting to UTF-8 always fix them. I think that Notepad++ can do that on windows. (If you do this on your PHP files, every strings on them will not need the functions htmlspecialchars() , html_entity_decode , etc )

Second: if you are using HTML Output, check if you have <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" /> on your header...

Third: Do what @janmoesen said on your MySQL DB.

Tell me something about that.

Answer 3

I just fixed a very similar problem with accented characters not displaying. My database table is utf-8 encoded and my html header is correctly set for utf-8.

I hadn't specified a charset for my MySQL connection, in my case I'm using PDO.

$this->pdo = new PDO("mysql:host=$host;dbname=$dbname;charset=utf8;", $username, $password);

No problems now!

Answer 4

In case this helps anyone using PHP Classes.

My solution was to set Character Encoding to my Connection.

//connect to MySQL and select DB
public function open_connection() {
    $this->connection = new mysqli( DB_SERVER, DB_USER, DB_PASS, DB_NAME );
    if ( !$this->connection ) {
        die( "Database connection failed: " . mysqli_error() );
    }
    mysqli_set_charset($this->connection,"utf8");
}