Special characters showing up on content retrieved from mysql using php

Question

I have content stored in a mysql database. When I am trying to retrieve the content using PHP and display it using html and CSS, some of it displays these special characters ��.

I have declared the encoding type in my HTML, used to render the PHP content as follows.

I have also added this to the head off the html document

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

    <!-- [portable options] -->
    <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0, maximum-scale=1.0;" />
    <meta name="apple-mobile-web-app-capable" content="yes" />

What mistake am I making that the retrieved content shows the special characters?

This is the document that contains the PHP script that retrieves the data from mysql

<!DOCTYPE html> 
<html> 
<head> 
    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
    <meta charset="utf-8">


    <!-- [loading stylesheets] -->    
    <link type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" href="css/style.css" />      

    <!-- [loading stylesheets] -->    
    <link type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" href="css/style.css" />
    <link type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" href="css/flexslider.css" />      

    <!-- [loading scripts] -->   

    <script type="text/javascript" src="js/jquery-2.0.3.min.js"></script>
    <script type="text/javascript" src="js/main.js"></script>

    </head>
    <body>
    <div class="blog-post">
                  <div class="wrapper">
                  <!--
                  <iframe frameborder="0" scrolling="yes" width="100%" height="500px" 
   src="debug/includes/news_index.php" name="" id="">
 </iframe>
 -->
         <?php
    // connection string constants
    define('DSN', 'mysql:dbname=mydb;host=localhost');
    define('USER', 'myadmin');
    define('PASSWORD', 'mypwd2015');

    // pdo instance creation
    $pdo = new PDO(DSN, USER, PASSWORD);

    // query preparation
    $stmt = $pdo->query("
        SELECT title, introtext, id, created, created_by, catid
        FROM mytbl_items 
    ");

    // fetching results
    $result = $stmt->fetchAll(PDO::FETCH_ASSOC);

    // if this returns 0 then it means no records are present
    echo count($result) . "\n";

    // the loop should print valid table
    foreach ($result as $index => $row) {
        if ($index == 0) echo '<div>';
        echo <<<HTM

        <span class="post-date">{$row['created']}</span>

        <h2 class="blog-post-title">{$row['title']}</h2>

        <p>
            {$row['introtext']}
        </p>
        <p>
            <a href='read_serverside.php?id={$row['id']}'><input type="button" value="Read More" /></a>
        </p>
        <div class="blog-meta">
            <img src="img/avatar.png" alt="Avatar" />
            <h4 class="blog-meta-author">{$row['created_by']}</h4>
            <span>Category: {$row['catid']}</span>
        </div>
HTM;
        if ($index == (count($result)-1)) echo '</div>';
    }
    ?>
                   </div> <!-- .blog-meta --> 
                </div> <!-- .blog-post #2 --> 

    </body>
</html>

What else should I do to avoid the special chars from showing up?

If you can, stop using **mysql_*** and start **using mysqli_*** or **PDO** instead as it's deprecated, also take a look at [this](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/279170/utf-8-all-the-way-through) — Naruto, Sep 22 '15 at 12:28
What text are you retrieving from the database. maybe you could take a look at `htmlentities()` — SuperDJ, Sep 22 '15 at 12:31

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Sep 23 '15 at 09:51

1

Try setting the utf8 charset at the PDO Connection like this:

$pdo = new PDO(DSN, USER, PASSWORD,array(PDO::MYSQL_ATTR_INIT_COMMAND => "SET NAMES utf8"));

answered Sep 23 '15 at 09:51

snitch182

723
11
21

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Aug 31 '17 at 19:06

1

This works for me. Try this one before the start of HTML. I hope it will also work for you.

<?php header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-15'); ?>
<!DOCTYPE html>

<html lang="en-US">
<head>

answered Aug 31 '17 at 19:06

Hafiz Ameer Hamza

462
1
4
14

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Sep 22 '15 at 12:34

There are characters in your database that does not exist in Unicode UTF 8. The data are not recognized by this format so thew are displayed as weird characters. I suggest you change the <meta charset="utf-8"> into @charset 'iso-8859-15' or to delete the line. If this does not work you have to go to the data that are causing the error and determine the type of encoding that is used.

score 0 · Answer 4 · answered Sep 22 '15 at 12:40

If you have main or front controller you should put

header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8');

somewhere there. If you haven't put that call at the very beginning of your file before you start output html:

<?php header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8'); ?>
<!DOCTYPE html> 
<html> 
<head> 
......

Special characters showing up on content retrieved from mysql using php

4 Answers4