Cant retrieve greek characters from mysql database with PHP

Question

while i can see the data saved in the MySQL table are the Greek characters, when i try to echo them from PHP, they turn into "?" question marks.

View your html source to see what is being produced. Likely you will need to encode the characters before the browser will render them appropriately. — Jared, May 22 '12 at 15:43
check this [post](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11806319/php-mysql-greek-letters-showing-like-marks) Its the same question. — Marios, Nov 04 '13 at 19:01

score 5 · Accepted Answer · edited Oct 06 '14 at 14:23

5

Make sure your client connection is set for UTF8. Examples:

SQL

SET NAMES UTF8;

PHP MySQLi

mysqli_set_charset('utf8');

PHP PDO

$handle = new PDO("mysql:host=localhost;dbname=dbname",
  'username', 'password', 
  array(PDO::MYSQL_ATTR_INIT_COMMAND => "SET NAMES utf8"
));

PHP mysql (deprecated - do not use)

mysql_set_charset('utf8');

edited Oct 06 '14 at 14:23

i alarmed alien

answered May 22 '12 at 15:46

Ben Morley

score 2 · Answer 2 · answered May 22 '12 at 15:45

2

Try using htmlentities to encode your special characters before echo'ing your data.

echo htmlentities($data);

answered May 22 '12 at 15:45

Jared

score 2 · Answer 3 · answered May 22 '12 at 15:48

Be sure that your file are saved using ANSI as UTF-8 aka UTF-8 without BOM. You can do it using NotePad++ : http://npp-community.tuxfamily.org/documentation/notepad-user-manual/document-properties/encoding

Also, when working with UTF-8 (Unicode) please remember :

3 Answers3