Search when iconv fails

PHP
5

After being side-tracked and delayed by a frustrating character encoding problem Can't Match Some (Foreign) Films After Table Convert to UTF8 (General or Unicode) - #19 by Mittineague I decided to put my arrays into a database.

For fun I used mysqli_ procedural, mysqli_ OOP, and PDO

Despite my being a relative newbie at Normalization, for example purposes I’ll digress and post them.

First up, mysqli_ procedural

$db_connection = mysqli_connect(HOST, USERNAME, PASSWORD, DATABASE);
if (mysqli_connect_errno()) {
    printf("Connect failed: %s\n", mysqli_connect_error());
    exit();
}
$create_countries_table_query = "CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `" . $countries_table_name
				. "` (
				`id` TINYINT UNSIGNED NOT NULL
				, `name` VARCHAR(100) NOT NULL
				, PRIMARY KEY (`id`)
				);";
$create_countries_table_result = mysqli_query($db_connection, $create_countries_table_query);
if (!$create_countries_table_result) {
  echo "create_countries_table_result FAIL " . mysqli_error($db_connection) . "<br/><br/>";
}  

$create_states_table_query = "CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `" . $states_table_name
				. "` (
				`name` VARCHAR(100) NOT NULL
				, `country_id` TINYINT UNSIGNED NOT NULL
				, `phoneme` VARCHAR(100) NOT NULL
				, PRIMARY KEY (`name`)
				);";
$create_states_table_result = mysqli_query($db_connection, $create_states_table_query);
if (!$create_states_table_result) {
  echo "create_states_table_result FAIL " . mysqli_error($db_connection) . "<br/><br/>";
}  

$create_cities_table_query = "CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `" . $cities_table_name
				. "` (
				`name` VARCHAR(100) NOT NULL
				, `state_name` VARCHAR(100) NOT NULL
				, `phoneme` VARCHAR(100) NOT NULL
				, PRIMARY KEY (`name`, `state_name`)
				);";
$create_cities_table_result = mysqli_query($db_connection, $create_cities_table_query);
if (!$create_cities_table_result) {
  echo "create_cities_table_result FAIL " . mysqli_error($db_connection) . "<br/><br/>";
}  
mysqli_close($db_connection);

Of course these are simple CREATE TABLE queries, but notice that
mysqli_connect() differs from mysql_connect() in that it takes the database name as a parameter and does not need an equivalent mysql_select_db() function to create the resource.
mysqli_query() differs from mysql_query() in that the resource and query parameters are reversed

I may need to run some ALTER TABLE queries at some point, but this has been good enough for a start for my purposes.