PDO and special characters

Question

I have my page encoding set to utf8 and even in the meta tag as utf8.

However, when i'm taking a value from a database it's putting a diamond with a question mark instead - im assuming doesnt know the character.

The character is a é. If i do a echo é; it displays as normal on the page. Also if i write it manually in html. However, when i grab the same value from a database call using PDO i get a �

I'm assuming its a PDO setting. I've tried:

$db->exec("SET NAMES 'utf8';");

but this doesnt resolve it.

Any suggestions?

what's the charset on the table itself? the entire rendering pipeline has to be the same charset, or at least chained with appropriate conversion logic. e.g. browser->server->php->database->table->database->php->server->browser — Marc B, Jul 12 '13 at 21:36
"even meta tag" means for the browser little less than nothing — Your Common Sense, Jul 12 '13 at 21:39
If you are on php 5.3.6+, you should set your character set in the dsn string (the first argument of the PDO constructor) like `;charset=utf8`. — jeroen, Jul 12 '13 at 21:45
managed to resolve this by adding utf8_encode($variablename) to the variables — user2183216, Jul 12 '13 at 21:45
Please do `var_dump(unpack('H*', "é"));` and tell us the output. — Gumbo, Jul 13 '13 at 08:54

score 2 · Answer 1 · edited Feb 12 '16 at 10:51

Many things can go wrong on the way. Usually you need to have your source file encoded using utf-8, and opening the database connection using utf-8 and defining the database tables as utf-8.

A great article from @deceze that helped me clarify things is http://kunststube.net/frontback/.

The most obvious things you can try in your case are:

Save you source file with utf8 encoding. This option exists in editors like Notepad++ or Crimpson Editor.
create the PDO connection with utf8 option:

$connection = new PDO('mysql:host='.$this->host.';dbname='.$this->db_name.';charset=utf8', $this->user, $this->pass,array(PDO::ATTR_EMULATE_PREPARES => false, PDO::ATTR_ERRMODE => PDO::ERRMODE_EXCEPTION));
make sure your table is utf-8 encoded and your form has the option :

< form action="action.php" accept-charset="utf-8">

Update: maybe utf8_encode fixed your problem, but there is a wrong conversion somewhere from the PHP to the database and back. or an wrong file encoding. You should fix the root of the problem, and utf8_encode will not be needed anymore.

PDO and special characters

1 Answers1