Garbled UTF-8 characters in PHP

Answer 1

This is happening because you didn't properly set the encoding to UTF-8 (or another one that contains all characters you want to display). To do this, you need to:

• Set the encoding to UTF-8 in the database itself (you can skip this step if you can see the text properly in PhpMyAdmin).

• Tell PHP that you're using UTF-8. To do this, run:

  mysql_query("SET NAMES utf8");
  

  right after you connect to the database (add this line to the end of your sql_connect.php file).

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Please note that you shouldn't use mysql_* functions anymore (see my comment on your question). If you switch to MySQLi, you can run this:

$db->set_charset("utf-8");

to change the charset.

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See also:

• UTF-8 all the way through
• How can I prevent SQL-injection in PHP?