Alternative to manual "SET NAMES utf8" on every database call [duplicate] - php

Question

This question already has answers here:
Whether to use "SET NAMES"
(3 answers)
Closed 9 years ago.
I have Japanese on my site coming from a mysql database.
Other Japanese text on the site displays fine, but the stuff coming out of the database looks like:
????????
The database is set to UTF8, so is the web page.
To fix the issue, before I make any calls to the database I use:
$db->query("SET NAMES utf8");
I was wondering if there was a better/easier way to do the above without having to set names before every query?

Answer 1

You don't have to use SET NAMES utf8 before every query, you just have to run it once the connection is established. Here's an example with PDO :
try {
$dns = "mysql:host={HOST};dbname={DB}";
$user = "{USER}";
$pass = "{PASS}";
$con = new PDO($dns, $user, $pass);
} catch ( Exception $e ) {
echo "Connexion error ", $e->getMessage();
die();
}
$con->query("SET NAMES utf8;");
//and now, as many queries as you want
If you're using PHP >= 5.3.6, you can define the charset in the connection string (prior PHP versions ignore it) :
try {
$dns = "mysql:host={HOST};dbname={DB};charset=utf8";
$user = "{USER}";
$pass = "{PASS}";
$con = new PDO($dns, $user, $pass);
} catch ( Exception $e ) {
echo "Connexion error ", $e->getMessage();
die();
}
//and now, as many queries as you want