special chars from database entrys cause problems

Tillllll

Hi there.

Got my documents set up in utf-8. and html meta tag as usual.

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

If I write special characters like "á" OR "Ü" directly into the code, theyre displayed right

Café

if i load the string from my database though

$query=mysqli_query($link, 'SELECT * FROM services WHERE sid = 1;');
while($row=mysqli_fetch_assoc($query)){
    echo 'name: '.$row['name'];
}

it looks like

Caf�

I chose "utf-8_general_ci" in phpMyAdmin when i created the database.

Does anyone see the problem? I've been gooling around but haven't pretty much what I'm looking for.

dagon

make sure tte db connection is using utf-8 and the collation of the db field is utf-8

add

mysql_query("SET NAMES 'utf8');

after your connection

Derokorian

Just to clarify dagon missed a closing quote:

mysql_query("SET NAMES 'utf8'");

Tillllll

thanks 4 the hints
finally this got it done since I'm using mysqli:

mysqli_query($link, 'set character set utf8;');

me so happy 😃

crsland

A very common mistake is having your file.php set in ANSI format. Be sure to set it to
utf8 without BOM

crsland

check in the preferences in your text editor or IDE

johanafm

crsland;10986388 wrote:
A very common mistake is having your file.php set in ANSI format. Be sure to set it to
utf8 without BOM

But it actually only matters if you write string literals in such a file. For example, consider this file stored as non-utf8

# file's character encoding matters for string literals stored directly in this file
$string_from_within_this_file = 'é will not work';

# But from the outside, this file's character encoding doesn't matter at all.
# What does matter is the character encoding of the external source
$string_from_utf8_source = somehow_retrieve_string();

# assuming the second string contains the same characters as the first one, but
# with utf-8 encoding, that one will work fine.

# although, when mixing character encodings you have to be very careful, since
$string_from_within_this_file != $string_from_utf8_source;