Why am I seeing '�' characters in my PHP output when retrieving data from a database?

PHP Output Displaying Incorrect Characters

When retrieving data from a database source in PHP, characters like black diamonds with a question mark (�) may appear in varchar fields. This issue arises when the text stored in the database differs in encoding from the PHP script's interpretation.

Solution

The issue stems from a mismatch between the character encoding of the text and the encoding used for display. Typically, the text is encoded in single-byte encoding (e.g., ISO-8859-1) but is being interpreted in Unicode (e.g., UTF8 or UTF16).

To resolve the problem, consider the following options:

• Set HTTP Content-Type Header: Add the following header to the PHP script to indicate the correct character encoding for the response:

header("Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1");

• Use Meta Tag: Alternatively, add a meta tag to the HTML document:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">

• Read Database with Correct Encoding: Retrieve the data from the database using the appropriate character encoding (e.g., UTF-8).
• Use iconv(): Convert the text to the correct encoding using the iconv() function:

$convertedText = iconv("ISO-8859-1", "UTF-8", $text);

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