PHP - UTF8 Decoding Issue [duplicate] - php

Question

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The ultimate emoji encoding scheme
(2 answers)
Closed 6 years ago.
I am having problems decoding UTF8 characters in my script from my sql.
Lets say I have two characters coming from mysql:
'á' & ❤️
with my script á is decoded fine however, the emoticon is decoded in â¤ï
What am I doing wrong?
$conn = new mysqli($servername, $username, $password, $dbname);
$sql="SELECT * FROM `community` ORDER BY `community`.`date` DESC LIMIT 25";
mysqli_set_charset($conn, "utf8"); //UTF8
$result = $conn->query($sql);
while($row = $result->fetch_assoc()) {
$comment = $row['comment'];
echo $comment . "</br>";
//echo htmlentities($comment); not working... white screen
}
UPDATE
I have changed Database and Tables
$conn = new mysqli($servername, $username, $password, $dbname);
$sql="SELECT * FROM `community` ORDER BY `community`.`date` DESC LIMIT 25";
mysqli_set_charset($conn, "utf8"); //UTF8
$result = $conn->query($sql);
while($row = $result->fetch_assoc()) {
$comment = $row['comment'];
$comment = mb_convert_encoding($comment, "UTF-8");
echo $comment . "</br>";
//echo htmlentities($comment); not working... white screen
}

Answer 1

Your issue here is probably with the database.
You need to set your database charset to UTF-8 in order to query it correctly, what you are doing is to get a string and setting Client side default charset using
mysqli_set_charset($conn, "utf8"); //UTF8
That's not enough, so I would recommend you to run an SQL query like
ALTER DATABASE databasename CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci;
in order to update it. If what you need is to change a single table use
ALTER TABLE tablename CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci;
Finally you can check it using
SELECT DEFAULT_COLLATION_NAME FROM data_dictionary.SCHEMAS WHERE SCHEMA_NAME = 'databasename' LIMIT 1;
As an extra appointment and just in case in PHP you can convert the encoding of a string using
$comment = mb_convert_encoding($comment, "UTF-8"); //Change encoding
echo mb_detect_encoding($str, "auto"); // Check encoding
Of course you should make a backup before making any of these changes, just in case.
EDIT: The proper order to run these queries, is:
Run it in the whole DB using the first query
Run it table by table using the second query
Check if the charset has been set correctly using the third query
EDIT 2 : Remember to set the tag <meta charset="UTF-8"> in your html file.
I hope this helps you :)