Why do I have to use utf8_decode before I insert an already UTF8 string in mysql?

Question

I am running into a problem, that I managed to fix by simply trying different options, but I don't understand why it works, it does not make sense to me...

Here it is, I receive UTF8 encoded JSON from Facebook, my table is in utf8_general_ci and my DB connection is UTF8 encoded too.

If I don't do anything special, the string is inserted as

FabiÃ©n

but if I utf8_decode it before inserting it is inserted as

Fabién

When I call mb_detect_encoding on my string, it returns UTF8.

Can anyone explain why I have to use utf8_decode for it to work? Or better, what to do to fix my code so I don't have to call utf8_decode?

Thanks in advance.

No, the charset is utf8 as well. I created all my tables with the charset utf8 and collation utf8_general_ci. It's in phpmyadmin that I see the 2 examples from the question. Is there a way to change the encoding of the view? — Fabien Warniez, Sep 18 '12 at 20:19

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Oct 11 '17 at 14:11

If your database/table/field is utf8_general_ci and the string is UTF-8, you should not convert the string before insert it.

You should select from the database and before printing in HTML, you should convert from UTF-8 to Latin1 (iso-8859-1) using this code:

 mb_convert_encoding($selected_string, 'utf-8', 'iso-8859-1')

score 0 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 10:25

0

Found the problem, you have to execute the command "SET NAMES utf8" after establishing the connection to the DB with PDO. I am using an older version of PHP (5.3.6), and charset=utf8 is ignored in the connection string...

See this question: PHP PDO: charset, set names?

edited May 23 '17 at 10:25

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answered Sep 18 '12 at 21:28

Fabien Warniez

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Why do I have to use utf8_decode before I insert an already UTF8 string in mysql?

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