SET NAMES utf8 in MySQL?

Question

I often see something similar to this below in PHP scripts using MySQL

query(\"SET NAMES utf8\");   

I have never had to do this for any pr

Answer 1

Not only PDO. If sql answer like '????' symbols, preset of you charset (hope UTF-8) really recommended:

if (!$mysqli->set_charset("utf8")) 
 { printf("Can't set utf8: %s\n", $mysqli->error); }

or via procedure style mysqli_set_charset($db,"utf8")