Cyrillic shows fine in db, displays ? on website

PHP
1

I tried to switch all my content in the database to UTF8 because some characters weren’t showing up. I switched everything in the database, all column collations, tables, etc to
utf8_general_ci. I made sure my header.php specifies the charset as UTF8. I added

AddDefaultCharset UTF-8

to .htaccess. I also ran the query:

SET NAMES utf8

directly in the database. But when I try to load the page I’m getting ??? where Cyrillic should be. I can even see the correct characters in the database. Firefox displays Cyrillic just fine everywhere not on my site, so I can’t figure out what’s wrong.

2

Do you know the encoding of your server? You can check in your browser what encoding the server is using as it delivers pages. E.g. In Chrome, go to View > Encoding.

3

Looks like everything is set to UTF-8 and left-to-right. I’ve since exported the database as utf8 and then dropped everything and imported it and that didn’t work. This problem also exists in IE, Firefox, and Chrome.

4

Temporary workaround I’ve found while waiting to fix the issue, I converted the cyrillic into straight HTML and just put that into the db. Here’s the thing I used to save from having to look up each character. web.forret.com/tools/html.asp

5

Do you send this header in the beginning of your script?

header("Content-type:text/html; charset=utf-8");

And also this query should be executed each time right after connection to DB in your script (not just once):

SET NAMES utf8
6

Yeah, I have my header.php set to incorporate that, I’m going to try updating my db connection settings for your second suggestion.

7

The problem is not in your DB (you’ve covered that). To me, your problem stems from:

  • the PHP script (.php)
  • the HTML template (.html)

Make sure BOTH are also UTF-8. For example, in your editor, make sure the “File Settings” is UTF-8 also. If it’s anything other, you’re going to have problems.

Everything must be UTF-8 not just the DB. Remember, the users will be typing stuff into your HTML web forms, and in this case your web form / HTML template should also be UTF-8 as well as add accept-charset=“UTF-8” in your web :

<form ....... accept-charset="UTF-8">
8

What charset is the connection between PHP and MySQL set to use (and what database extension is being used)?

9

another thing to try when outputting to webpage:
htmlentities( $string, /ENT_QUOTES/ENT_NOQUOTES, ‘UTF-8’ )

10

My header has the utf8 charset in there, and I was using Notepad++ set to UFT-8 without BOM, but I can’t figure out how to set the encoding in Brackets.

11

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