cannot display trademark symbol in mysql to html - php

Question

I am a starter in php/mySQL, and I am currently facing a problem to display symbol such as ® onto my html. The symbol is stored in a table which can display properly when viewed from phpmyadmin, but when I use php to retrieve the table content, it does not display the symbol but instead displaying a symbol of a diamond with a ? inside it. I have set the html page to utf-8 and my table to utf8_general_ci but no luck from those.
The symbol is able to display correctly when I put straight to html or even store in php variable.
The query I used to get the content is
while ($row = mysql_fetch_array($result)){
echo ($row["symbol"]);
}
Many thanks in advance

Answer 1

You can use html character entities instead of direct symbol
Do not use
®
Try it
®

Answer 2

These types of encoding issues can get complex when dealing with different character sets. In these cases, just changing the collation will not fix the problem, you need to change the CHARSET. Only after changing the CHARSET should you worry about the collation (they are not the same thing).
Just to be safe, export your database/table before altering it.
I would begin, by converting the table to utf8 since it is now the standard.
ALTER TABLE tbl_name
CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET utf8
By doing this, it will also change the CHARSET of the table and columns to utf8, but you may still need to manually change the collation of the columns to utf8_general_ci (seems like you have already done that).
In the event you want to change the default character set (for new columns)...
ALTER TABLE tbl_name
DEFAULT CHARACTER SET utf8
EDIT :
If changing the CHARSET in the database doesn't work, you can try setting it on the PHP side. Just add this after your connection.
mysql
mysql_set_charset("utf8");
mysqli
$mysqli->set_charset("utf8");
PDO
PDO::MYSQL_ATTR_INIT_COMMAND => "SET CHARACTER SET 'utf8'"
Here is some helpful documentation:
10.1 Character Set Support
10.1.12 Column Character Set Conversion
10.1.13.1 Unicode Character Sets

Answer 3

You can convert the trademark, copyright or other symbols into/out database via an HTMLEntity
The htmlentities() function converts characters to HTML entities.
Reference: http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.htmlentities.php
Reference: http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.htmlspecialchars.php
® Registered Trademark ®
™ Trademark Symbol: ™
Other useful information and symbols can be found here: http://www.w3schools.com/html/html_entities.asp