Croatian diacritic signs in MySQL db (utf-8)

Question

Diacritic signs http://img98.imageshack.us/img98/3383/dijakritickiznakovi.gif

So, symbols belows display title should be displayed that way.
UTF-8 entities are listed below HTML (utf-8) title (here is list: LINK)
And last line shows what is stored in my database.
Collation of db table is utf8_unicode_ci.
I suppose that symbols in db shouldn't be as they are in my case? They are displaying correctly on page when loaded from database, but they all of them are not displayed by utf-8 table from given link. Even if I see them correctly maybe someone other won't?

Answer 1

Setting the MySQL table charset is not enough - you should also take care to set the correct charset for the client, the connection and the results, which defaults may differ from server to server making your database less than portable: the same database content might be displayed differently moving to another server.

I've been storing slovenian text into MySQL for some time now and this is what works for me:

• the first thing you do after connecting should be to issue a "SET NAMES utf8" query
• make sure that the strings you're storing are utf-8 to start with: if you're taking them from a web page form make sure the page is UTF-8
• be careful what tools do you use to browse/edit the database contents online: PhpMysqlAdmin is definitely unsafe.

Hope this helps.

Answer 2

You appear to be trying to store HTML-encoded strings in your database. Don't do that, it will only break your ability to do string operations like searching reliably. You should be able to store raw UTF-8 encoded characters as bytes in your database.

You don't say what environment you're using to read the database or how you get the ‘incorrect’ string at the bottom (which is UTF-8 bytes read using ISO-8859-1 encoding). If they appear in your web page (and you're specifying UTF-8 in the headers and/or <meta> tag), you're presumably pretty much there.