Resolving incorrect character encoding when displaying MySQL database results after upgrade to PHP 5.3

Question

Issue Description

After upgrading PHP on our development server from 5.2 to 5.3, we\'re encountering an issue where data requested from our database and displayed

Answer 1

If you have made sure that both the tables, and the output encoding are UTF-8, almost the only thing left is the connection encoding.

The reason for the change in behaviour when updating servers could be a change of the default connection encoding:

[mysql]
default-character-set=utf8

However, I can't see any changes in the default encoding between versions, so if those were brand-new installs, I can't see that happening.

Anyway, what happens if you run this from within your PHP query and output the results. Any differences to the command line output?

 SHOW VARIABLES LIKE 'character_set%';
 SHOW VARIABLES LIKE 'collation%';