Unicode characters displayed incorrectly

[Squarepusher]

No matter what I try, unicode characters that are read from a MySQL database like japanese ones are replaced by "?" while characters like "ä", "ö", "ü", "»", "«", etc. are replaced by "�".

I pasted this at the top of the PHP code:

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

mb_internal_encoding('UTF-8');
mb_http_output('UTF-8');
mb_http_input('UTF-8');
mb_regex_encoding('UTF-8');

I saved the PHP file as UTF-8 and UTF-8 without BOM and put <meta charset="UTF-8"> into it. (When I insert unicode characters directly in the file, they're displayed correctly, though...)

I set the encoding in the phpMyAdmin database table to different "UTF-8" encodings. (They're displayed correctly too when viewed in the table directly...)

Nothing worked so far.

 

Any ideas?

Edited December 18, 2018 by Squarepusher

[Ingolme]

Perhaps your database connection code needs to be set to use UTF-8.

[Squarepusher]

I set "collation connection", "collation server" and "collation database" to "utf8_general_ci" and "character set server", "character set results", "character set filesystem", "character set database", "character set connection" and "character set client" to "utf8" but it still doesn't help.

[justsomeguy]

You do that in PHP after connecting to the database?

[Squarepusher]

No, I changed those variables in phpMyAdmin.

[justsomeguy]

You need to change the actual connection, between your PHP script and MySQL.  You do that in your PHP code.  e.g.:

$pdo = new PDO(    
        "mysql:host=localhost;dbname=databasename",     
        "user",    
        "pass",     
        array(PDO::MYSQL_ATTR_INIT_COMMAND => "SET NAMES utf8")
);

 

[Squarepusher]

Oh, I didn't know this. Thanks, it works now!