PDO + MySQL and broken UTF-8 encoding

Question

I use the PDO library with a MySQL database in PHP, but if I insert any data encoded in UTF-8, like Arabic words, it’s inserted into the database, but as ?????????

Answer 1

All attempts like:

PDO::MYSQL_ATTR_INIT_COMMAND =>"SET NAMES 'utf8mb4' COLLATE 'utf8mb4_unicode_ci' "

or

$this->connection = new PDO('mysql:host='.DBHOST.';dbname='.DBNAME.';charset=utf8', DBUSER, DBPASS, self::$opt);

or

$this->connection->exec("set names utf8");

still generated unreadable text mess.

In my case, the cause of the problem was: htmlentities used prior to inserting data into a database. Cyrillic letters were destroyed completely.