Characters like à not displaying correctly from MySQL

Question

I have a problem when displaying results from a database in an HTML file in two computers.

So, in one computer it shows a name like this:

SAUL FRANCI         


        

Answer 1

Editing php.ini won’t help you much in a case like this.

What is the data collation of the database giving you an issue? By default, most MySQL installs set latin1_swedish_ci instead of utf8_general_ci for newly created databases.

Change the collation of the database & try again.

ALTER DATABASE [name of your database] CHARACTER SET utf8;

If this is a specific table, the collation can be changed as so:

ALTER TABLE [name of your table] CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET utf8;

And if it is a specific column in a table:

ALTER TABLE [name of your table] MODIFY [name of your column] [other settings] CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci;

Or perhaps you could export the current database, create a new database with this command & reimport the data:

CREATE DATABASE [name of your database] CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci;

And if you want to make a permanent change to the MySQL install on the machine giving you an issue, go and edit my.cnf. The following would set the whole chain to UTF-8:

[client]
default-character-set=utf8

[mysql]
default-character-set=utf8

[mysqld]
collation-server = utf8_unicode_ci
init-connect='SET NAMES utf8'
character-set-server = utf8

Answer 2

add <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"> to the head of your html

Answer 3

You could set PHP to output the content as UTF-8:

header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8');

In your HTML document you can specify to the browsers that the content it is UTF-8, by putting this in the HEAD of your pages:

<meta charset="UTF-8">