characters showing up as question mark

Question

I'm having trouble getting characters with accents to show up properly on my site. My site uses data from an Excel file that I dump into a MySQL DB. The tables in this DB are set to utf8_general_ci and I have the following in my head:

<meta charset="utf-8">

When I look at the data in PHPMyAdmin, everything looks fine, the characters show up. But on my site, characters such as ñ show up as a question mark in a black diamond.

I really don't understand what I'm doing wrong. Anyone know what's up?

See [UTF-8 all the way through](http://stackoverflow.com/a/279279). — eggyal, Feb 23 '14 at 08:49

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Feb 23 '14 at 08:43

By default, Mysql returns in Latin 1

try setting the values to utf8 after you're connected (in php) :

$db = mysql_connect(DB_HOST, DB_USER, DB_PASS);
mysql_select_db(DB_NAME);
mysql_set_charset('utf8', $db);
mysql_query("SET character_set_results = 'utf8', character_set_client = 'utf8', character_set_connection = 'utf8', character_set_database = 'utf8', character_set_server = 'utf8'");

Obviously, also make sure you declare your file as UTF8 in your head:

<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />

Thanks for the suggestions Vincent. Unfortunately I tried them all, emptied the database and reloaded it and I still have the problem — user2874270, Feb 23 '14 at 08:49

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Feb 23 '14 at 19:42

1

Figured it out! My source file for the data (a tab delimited text file from excel) needed to be re-saved in UTF-8. Once I did that, I was able to reload the data and get rid of the problem

answered Feb 23 '14 at 19:42

user2874270

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characters showing up as question mark

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