Why is this the extended ascii character (â, é, etc) getting replaced with <?> characters?

Question

Why is this the extended ascii character (â, é, etc) getting replaced with characters?

I attached a pic... but I am using PHP to pull the data from MySQL,

Answer 1

These special characters generally appear due to the the extensions. If we provide a meta tag with charset=utf-8 we can eliminate them by adding:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">

to your meta tags

Answer 2

Simplest fix

ini_set( 'default_charset', 'UTF-8' );

this way you don't have to worry about manually sending the Content-Type header yourself.

EDIT

Make sure you are actually storing data as UTF-8 - sending non-UTF-8 data to the browser as UTF-8 is just as likely to cause problems as sending UTF-8 data as some other character set.

SELECT table_collation
  FROM information_schema.`TABLES` T
 WHERE table_name=[Table Name];

SELECT default_character_set_name
     , default_collation_name
  FROM information_schema.`SCHEMATA` S
 WHERE schema_name=[Schema Name];

Check those values