How to properly handle international character in PHP / MySQL / Apache

Question

I need to create an application in PHP that can handle all Unicode characters in all places — edit fields, static HTML, database. Can somebody tell me the complete list of a

Answer 1

Some things you will need to look into:-

PHP

Make sure your content is marked as utf-8 :

default_charset = "utf-8"

Install mbstring. You can find it here

Ensure that you are talking utf-8 between PHP and MySQL.
Call mysql_set_charset("utf8"); (or use the SQL query SET NAMES utf8)

Apache

You also set the Content-Type: of your pages in here with something like this

AddDefaultCharset utf-8

MySQL

Make sure all your tables use utf8 Collation utf8_general_ci; eg

ALTER DATABASE mydb CHARACTER SET utf8;

Finally

Finally, test stuff with fun unicode samples, like these ones

٩(͡๏̯͡๏)۶

More helpful information from when I tried this...