encoding Romanian characters in php - php

Question

i have o problem encoding characters that look like this: ĂăÂâÎîȘșȚț
i am using the following mysql table:
CREATE TABLE `news` (
`NewsID` int(11) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
`UserID` int(11) NOT NULL,
`Title` varchar(255) CHARACTER SET utf8 NOT NULL,
`Date` datetime NOT NULL,
PRIMARY KEY (`NewsID`),
FULLTEXT KEY `Title` (`Title`,`Content`)
) ENGINE=MyISAM AUTO_INCREMENT=1 DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8 COLLATE=utf8_bin
I try to insert the upper mentioned character sequence in the Title field by using the following code (runs on zend framework):
$params = $this->getRequest()->getParams();
$mysqli = new mysqli("localhost", "user", "pass", "database_name");
$mysqli->query("INSERT INTO `news` (`NewsID`, `Title`) VALUES (NULL, '".$params['text']."');");
And in the database i get for the field Title the following value: ÃãÂâÎîȘșȚț
Why are these characters html encoded? And why aren't the first characters encoded to their utf8_bin equivalent ?
Thanks.

Answer 1

In my case I just updated php db connection settings with the following line:
mysqli_set_charset( $con, 'utf8');
Also i added in html file meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" as #liyakat mentioned.
Old thread, but maybe someone needs to know this.

Answer 2

Be sure that your IDE or text editor is also set to use UTF-8 characters.

Answer 3

To set the default to UTF-8, you want to add the following to my.cnf
[client]
default-character-set=utf8
[mysqld]
default-character-set = utf8
Then, to verify:
mysql> show variables like "%character%";show variables like "%collation%";
+--------------------------+----------------------------+
| Variable_name | Value |
+--------------------------+----------------------------+
| character_set_client | utf8 |
| character_set_connection | utf8 |
| character_set_database | utf8 |
| character_set_filesystem | binary |
| character_set_results | utf8 |
| character_set_server | utf8 |
| character_set_system | utf8 |
| character_sets_dir | /usr/share/mysql/charsets/ |
+--------------------------+----------------------------+
8 rows in set (0.00 sec)
+----------------------+-----------------+
| Variable_name | Value |
+----------------------+-----------------+
| collation_connection | utf8_general_ci |
| collation_database | utf8_general_ci |
| collation_server | utf8_general_ci |
+----------------------+-----------------+
3 rows in set (0.00 sec)
OR TRY
Try setting the MySQL connection to UTF-8:
SET NAMES 'utf8'
And send explicit UTF-8 headers, just in case your server has some other default settings:
header('Content-type: text/html; charset=utf-8');