UTF8 in PHP and MySQL

October 3, 2008 PHP 3 Comments

The intent of this article is to tie together some things I've learned to do in order to get my web apps to "play nicely" with the UTF8 character set. Before we go any further, let me state that I do not claim to be an expert on this; the following is simply a collection of things I've discovered here and there on the web, and which together seem to help smooth out most of the bumps in the road of using UTF8.

So let's start with the database itself. To get your varchar and text fields talking UTF8, you should assign both the character set and a corresponding collation. (See the MySQL manual section on character sets and collations to see the differences between the various collation types.) You can assign this stuff at the field level should you desire, but generally I just assign it at the table level:

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