php Error description: Incorrect string value: '\xF4t l'\xE9…' on insert

Question

I am inserting data from a UTF8-general-ci table to another UTF8-general-ci table. These are articles. About 20 or 30 will not insert due to random use of French titles or p

Answer 1

Try this with utf8_encode();

        $sql = "INSERT INTO table (col1)
        VALUES ('".utf8_encode($input_variable)."')";

        if ($conn->query($sql) === TRUE) 
        {
            echo "Inserted!";
        } else {
            echo "Error: " . $sql . "<br>" . $conn->error;
        }

Answer 2

The bytes you've quoted in your question (F4 and E9) aren't valid in UTF-8 data. Some or all of your data is probably actually ISO-8859-1 — you'll need to convert it to UTF-8 using mb_convert_encoding() or iconv().