How to prevent weird characters from showing up in web pages

Question

Often when outputting strings from a database onto a webpage, special characters get displayed as some other weird characters (in my example, an em-dash gets tu

Answer 1

Mojibake - This is the classic case of

• The bytes you have in the client are correctly encoded in utf8.
• You connected with SET NAMES latin1 (or set_charset('latin1') or ...), probably by default. (It should have been utf8.)
• The column in the table was declared CHARACTER SET latin1. (Or possibly it was inherited from the table/database.) (It should have been utf8.)

Answer 2

in your html view page use

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

and if you are inserting some other language character in place of english than make that column utf8-general-ci

Answer 3

You can try this.Use following php inbuilt function to avoid those characters on given string. In your case, data from database.

html_entity_decode($given_string,ENT_QUOTES, "ISO-8859-1");

Answer 4

On top of your page in header tag use the below code:

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