UTF-8 Database Problem

Question

I\'ve a MySQL table that has a UTF-8 charset and upon attempting to insert to it via a PHP form, the database gives the following error:

PDOStatement:

Answer 1

E8 is greater than the maximum usable character 7F in a one-byte UTF8 character: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8

It seems your connection is not set to UTF8 but some other 8 bit encoding like ISO Latin. If you set the database to UTF8 you only change the character set the database uses internally, connections may be on a different default value (latin1 for older MySQL versions) so you should try to send an initial SET CHARACTER SET utf-8 after connecting to the database. If you have access to my.cnf you can also set the correct default value there, but keep in mind that changing the default may break any other sites/apps running on the same host.