Special characters do not display in browser

Question

When echoing data from the MySQL database I get strange symbols in the text. I've tried htmlspecialchars_decode(), but to no avail. The data is stored as a VARCHAR in the MySQL database and is displayed as they should when queried in MySQL workbench.

The characters include ', ë, è, é, ê, ...

How do I get these characters to display in html?

Screenshot

This question has been asked before. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html — Strawberry, Dec 02 '14 at 16:37
possible duplicate of [UTF-8 all the way through](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/279170/utf-8-all-the-way-through) — vaso123, Dec 02 '14 at 16:38

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Dec 02 '14 at 16:39

1

Have you declared a charset in the HTML of your page?

In HTML5 this is fine:

<meta charset="UTF-8">

Older (HTML 4.01) needs something like:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">

answered Dec 02 '14 at 16:39

jonbaldie

378
5
12

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Dec 02 '14 at 16:50

You have encoding issues.

You need to set <meta charset="UTF-8">.
You need to run query after you set up connection to DB "SET NAMES utf8"
If you using PDO need set PDO like this new M_PDO("mysql:host={$dbhost};dbname={$dbname};charset=utf-8", $dbuser, $dbpassword);

Also you can use this function which will encode accents to html entities

function convert($str){
     return mb_convert_encoding($str, "HTML-ENTITIES", "UTF-8");
}
echo convert($YourDataFromDB);

Hope it will helps

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Dec 18 '14 at 09:22

0

This worked for me:

$db = Database::getInstance();
$mysqli = $db->getConnection();
$mysqli->set_charset('utf8mb4');

Stolen from UTF-8 all the way through

answered Dec 18 '14 at 09:22

David

965
3
12
24

Special characters do not display in browser

3 Answers3