Hi all,

I installed a complete LAMP on my computer and I have some trouble with the charset.
In MySql, I have a database with utf-8 characters.
I have a website on the localhost where every PHP page is encoded in utf-8 too. The HTML header specifies that the page is encoded in utf-8.

When I access the website from my web browser, all the characters look normal. But when I request some data from the MySql database, all the special characters (é è ç à...) are replaced with some strange character.
If I fill a form on my website with special characters and that I save this entry into my Mysql database, I get strange characters in my database too (but not the same).

I tried to set every default characterset as utf-8 wherever I could in PHP, Apache2 and MySql configuration files, without any success.

What should I do?

Thanks for any help,

- Emmanuel

which version of mysql are you using ? On newer version (starting 4.1 from memory), character sets/collations can be set in tons of different places: server, client, connection, database, table, column.... I would check that none of these have a value you do not want to use (like latin1), especially at the table or column level. A tool like phpMyAdmin (recent version) could help.

Run "show variables like '%collation%'" at a mysql prompt and hopefully you should see the expected utf value.