UTF8 Characters not displayed correctly

Question

In my mysql database i have string with german umlauts (ä, ö, ü).

I query them with php/mysql and when displayed on my website, they show up like this:

�

I have this html in my website:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />

edit: i have changed all collations to utf8_unicode_ci but the problem still persists

[Handling Unicode Front To Back In A Web App](http://kunststube.net/frontback/) — deceze, May 20 '13 at 12:22
How are they encoded in the database? How are you fetching them? How are you building the page? — Wooble, May 20 '13 at 12:23
@Wooble 1. i dont know, 2. mysql_query("SELECT ...") , 3. handwritten with notepad++ — clamp, May 20 '13 at 12:26
How did the data get into the database? How do you not know what encoding it's in? You can't just throw random bytes onto a page and claim it's utf-8. — Wooble, May 20 '13 at 12:27
is it the collation that specifies the encoding in mysql? if so, it is latin1. — clamp, May 20 '13 at 12:28
@Wooble 1. submitted via a POST-webform and then inserted with sql INSERT. 2. i dont know cause i didnt know where to look for it. — clamp, May 20 '13 at 12:39

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered May 20 '13 at 13:17

If you have written html meta tag as charset=UTF-8 and you have set Collation as utf8_unicode_ci character set and its not working then you must use

 mysql_set_charset('utf8');

use this where you have made your connection file, like this:-

    $link = mysql_connect("localhost","root","");
    $db = mysql_select_db('testing');
    mysql_set_charset('utf8');

1 Answers1