How to Ensure Correct Display of Special Characters in PHP and MySQL?

Special Characters in PHP and MySQL

When dealing with special characters in PHP and MySQL, unexpected characters can arise when displaying data in a browser. To address this issue, we'll explore a general solution.

According to the provided information, the HTML is set correctly with UTF-8 charset, and the MySQL tables and database are using UTF-8_spanish. However, the character represented as "?" with a square still persists.

The key to resolving this lies in the communication between the client application (the PHP script) and MySQL. MySQL needs to understand which character set the client expects to receive data in.

To communicate this to MySQL, the command SET NAMES 'utf8' should be executed as the first query upon establishing a connection. This ensures that all string data is transcoded from the internal character set into UTF-8, the encoding used by the client.

For PHP scripts using PDO, this can be achieved through the setAttribute method:

$db = new PDO($dsn, $user, $password);
$db->setAttribute(PDO::MYSQL_ATTR_INIT_COMMAND, "SET NAMES 'utf8'");

Alternatively, for PHP scripts using mysqli, the set_charset method can be used:

$mysqli = new mysqli("localhost", "user", "password", "db");
$mysqli->set_charset("utf8");

By implementing this solution, the special Spanish characters can be correctly inserted into the database from a PHP form and displayed in the browser without any garbled characters.

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