Accented characters stored in MySQL database

Question

I have a webapp that stores French text -- which potentially includes accented characters -- in a MySQL database. When data is retrieved directly through PHP, accented chara

Answer 1

You should use UTF-8 encoding for storing the data in the database - then everything should work as expected and no htmlentities() will be required.

Make sure all aspect are utf-8 - the database, the tables encoding and collation, and the connection, both on the client and server side. Things might work even if not everything is utf-8, but might fail horribly when you will do backup & restore - that is why I recommend utf-8 across the board.