Convert weird strings to UTF-8 Legible characters from PHP

Question

I'm getting some strings out of MYSQL like this:

Ï¼³Ï½ˆÏ½Ï½— Ï¼Ï½… Ï¼¹Ï½Ï½•Ï½’ Ï¼¢Ï½Ï½„Ï½™ BY Ï¼¹Ï½•Ï½Ï½Ï½™Ï½–Ï½ˆÏ½“
 Ï¼¶Ï¼¯Ï¼©Ï¼
Â É–¢ Ä¿‚ Ç›® Æ¨™ A F Â

The are titles that have been submitted by a user, but I cant seem to output them as regular characters. i suspect they might be Japanese characters, but I am not sure. The top of my html looks like this:

<meta charset="utf-8">

My MYSQL database encoded as:

 utf8mb4_unicode_ci

Is there a way to handle this and output them in HTML as readable characters? I'm pulling them out of mysql as a regular string - but they still output as garbage instead of legible characters. Is there a way to fix this? Or is this not utf-8?

Possible duplicate of [UTF-8 all the way through](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/279170/utf-8-all-the-way-through) — user3783243, Jul 02 '18 at 03:09
Why are you using 2 character encodings? Don't do that. Remove `` — user3783243, Jul 02 '18 at 03:09
@user my mysql says the field is utf8_general_ci and its set to utf8mb4_unicode_ci — Fight Fire With Fire, Jul 02 '18 at 03:30
It is using 2 character encodings, or one is the collation? You should use the same character sets. This also doesn't show what the PHP side is doing. You really should have UTF8 all the way through. — user3783243, Jul 02 '18 at 11:24

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Jul 02 '18 at 03:14

0

update php.ini:

default_charset = "utf-8";

update your mysql SCHEMA:

... DEFAULT CHARACTER SET UTF-8

answered Jul 02 '18 at 03:14

Tom

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Convert weird strings to UTF-8 Legible characters from PHP

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