php mysql query encoding problem

Question

I have a page with utf-8 encodin. Mysql is set to utf8_general_ci. Here is the query:

 mysql_query(\"SET CHARACTER SET utf8_general_ci\");

               $         


        

Answer 1

What I tend to find solves things a lot is;

mysql_query("SET NAMES 'utf8'");

Before any queries are performed.

The documentation recommends that you use mysql_set_charset but I often see that function missing.

if( function_exists('mysql_set_charset') ){
    mysql_set_charset('utf8', $db_con);
}else{
    mysql_query("SET NAMES 'utf8'", $db_con);
}