PDO and UTF-8 special characters in PHP / MySQL?

Question

I am using MySQL and PHP 5.3 and tried this code.

$dbhost = \'localhost\';
$dbuser = \'root\';
$dbpass = \'\';
$con = mysql_connect(\"localhost\", \"root\",          


        

Answer 1

You're missing an S: it's SET NAMES and not SET NAME:

$this->setAttribute(PDO::MYSQL_ATTR_INIT_COMMAND, "SET NAMES 'utf8'");

You also need to un-comment it of course. Also, PDO::MYSQL_ATTR_INIT_COMMAND can not be set with PDO::setAttribute() after you've established your database connection (the constant name says it all), you've to specify it in the constructor using the $driver_options argument, like this:

$this->db = new PDO($this->dsn, $this->username, $this->password, array(PDO::MYSQL_ATTR_INIT_COMMAND => "SET NAMES 'utf8'"));

An alternative to this is to just execute that very same query immediately after connecting:

$this->db = new PDO($this->dsn, $this->username, $this->password);
$this->db->exec("SET NAMES 'utf8';");