Why is phpMyAdmin Showing Garbage Text Instead of UTF-8 Characters?

Understanding the UTF-8 Issue in phpMyAdmin

phpMyAdmin, a widely used database management tool, can encounter challenges when displaying UTF-8 characters. This issue stems from the need for UTF-8 strings to be correctly stored in the database before phpMyAdmin can render them appropriately.

The problem arises when the database stores incorrect UTF-8 strings due to an incorrect character encoding. As a result, phpMyAdmin interprets the bytes of the stored strings as ASCII characters, leading to the display of "garbage text."

Troubleshooting the Incorrect Character Encoding

To address this issue, it's crucial to determine the charset collation settings for the database. The default charset for MySQL prior to version 4.1 was latin1, which is essentially ASCII. If the database is using latin1 to store UTF-8 text, it will lead to the aforementioned garbage text problem.

Resolution

The solution involves converting the database to the correct UTF-8 encoding. However, be cautious as this conversion can break web applications that are not charset-aware.

Step-by-Step Solution:

1. Back up the database as a .sql file.
2. Open the .sql file in a UTF-8 capable text editor and verify that the data appears correctly.
3. Search for charset collation settings of latin1 and replace latin1 with utf8.
4. Save the file as a new .sql file.
5. Import the new .sql file. The data should now display correctly in phpMyAdmin.
6. Add the configuration to my.ini for mysql-cli:

# CLIENT SECTION
[mysql]
default-character-set=utf8
# SERVER SECTION
[mysqld]
default-character-set=utf8

This will configure MySQL to use UTF-8 as the default character set for both client and server connections.

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