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

I just fixed a very similar problem with accented characters not displaying. My database table is utf-8 encoded and my html header is correctly set for utf-8.

I hadn't specified a charset for my MySQL connection, in my case I'm using PDO.

$this->pdo = new PDO("mysql:host=$host;dbname=$dbname;charset=utf8;", $username, $password);

No problems now!