Best practices in PHP and MySQL with international strings

Question

It often happens that characters such as é gets transformed to é, even though the collation for the MySQL DB, table and field is set to utf8_general_ci. T

Answer 1

Things you should do:

• Make sure Apache puts out UTF-8 content. Do this in your httpd.conf, or use PHP's header()-function to do it manually.
• Make sure your database connection is UTF8. SET NAMES utf8 does the trick.
• Make sure all your tables are set to UTF8.
• Make sure all your PHP and template files are encoded as UTF8 if you store international characters in them.

You usually don't have to do to much using the mb_string or utf8_encode/decode-functions when you do this.