Problems displaying French accented characters in UTF-8

Question

I\'m working on a French language site built in CakePHP. I have tried multiple functions to try and convert the text into UTF-8 and display properly, but have had no succes

Answer 1

Check your @@character_set_results. By default, MySQL uses latin1, not utf8. Try SET NAMES utf8 or mysqli::set_charset.

Update: here is how you might check the character sets in use:

mysql> SHOW VARIABLES LIKE '%char%';
+--------------------------+----------------------------+
| Variable_name            | Value                      |
+--------------------------+----------------------------+
| character_set_client     | utf8                       | 
| character_set_connection | utf8                       | 
| character_set_database   | utf8                       | 
| character_set_filesystem | binary                     | 
| character_set_results    | utf8                       | 
| character_set_server     | utf8                       | 
| character_set_system     | utf8                       | 
| character_sets_dir       | /usr/share/mysql/charsets/ | 
+--------------------------+----------------------------+

Read more on dev.mysql.com.