PDO, getting encoding errors

Question

Some time ago I built a website using mysqli to access a database with user info. This database contains some text in cyrillic.

Yesteday I replaced the mysqli with PDO. Now all the cyrillic looks like this:

Ð’Ð¸ÐºÑ‚Ð¾Ñ€Ð¸Ñ Ð‘ÐµÐ»Ð¾Ñ‡ÐºÐ¸Ð½Ð°

I have UTF8 encoding everywhere. Here is my code:

$pdo = new PDO('mysql:host=mysql.host.com;dbname=db;charset=utf8', 
'database', 'password');
$pdo->setAttribute(PDO::ATTR_ERRMODE, PDO::ERRMODE_EXCEPTION);
$pdo->exec("set names utf8");
return $pdo;

and on the page

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

What could be the reason?

I googled a lot but couldn't find a solution.

Answer 1

The last parameter of the PDO constructor call is the driver-specific options, given as an array with key => value pairs. The MySQL driver has a PDO::MYSQL_ATTR_INIT_COMMAND option where you can specify a command that is executed every time you connect to the database.

You can use the MySQL-specific query SET NAMES utf8 as a value for the init command, to tell MySQL to use UTF-8 as the character set for our connection:

$pdo = new PDO('mysql:host=mysql.host.com;dbname=db;array(PDO::MYSQL_ATTR_INIT_COMMAND => "SET NAMES utf8"', 
'database', 'password');