I'm having kind of a problem with mySQL collation. My mySQL collation is utf8mb4_unicode_ci. My pages have . When I send this text "São Paulo" to mySQL it stores "São Paulo" or if I send "Conceição" it stores "Conceição". It display correctly in my page "São Paulo" and "Conceção" with or without htmlentities(). When I do a search for "São Paulo" it brings the correct records.
Why does it store those strange characters? Is there a way they can match? I've tried changing the mySQL collation to utf8_unicode_ci, utf8_general_ci, latin1_swedish_ci, latin1_bin but nothing seems to work.