UTF-8 all the way through

In my case, I was using `mb_split`, which uses regular expressions. Therefore I also had to manually make sure the regular expression encoding was UTF-8 by doing `mb_regex_encoding('UTF-8');`

As a side note, I also discovered by running `mb_internal_encoding()` that the internal encoding wasn't UTF-8, and I changed that by running `mb_internal_encoding("UTF-8");`.

> **Warning:** This answer applies to PHP 5.3.5 and lower. Do not use it for PHP version 5.3.6 (released in March 2011) or later.
>
> Compare with [Palec's answer to _PDO + MySQL and broken UTF-8 encoding_](

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).

---

I found an issue with someone using [PDO][1] and the answer was to use this for the PDO connection string:

$pdo = new PDO(
'mysql:host=mysql.example.com;dbname=example_db',
"username",
"password",
array(PDO::MYSQL_ATTR_INIT_COMMAND => "SET NAMES utf8"));

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The only thing I would add to these amazing answers is to emphasize on saving your files in UTF-8 encoding, I have noticed that browsers accept this property over setting UTF-8 as your code encoding. Any decent text editor will show you this. For example, [Notepad++][1] has a menu option for file encoding, and it shows you the current encoding and enables you to change it. For all my PHP files I use UTF-8 without a [BOM][2].

Sometime ago I had someone ask me to add UTF-8 support for a PHP and MySQL application designed by someone else. I noticed that all files were encoded in ANSI, so I had to use [iconv][3] to convert all files, change the database tables to use the UTF-8 character set and *utf8_general_ci* collate, add 'SET NAMES utf8' to the database abstraction layer after the connection (if using 5.3.6 or earlier. Otherwise, you have to use charset=utf8 in the connection string) and change string functions to use the PHP multibyte string functions equivalent.

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I have just gone through the same issue and found a good solution at PHP manuals.

I changed all my files' encoding to UTF8 and then the default encoding on my connection. This solved all the problems.

if (!$mysqli->set_charset("utf8")) {
printf("Error loading character set utf8: %s\n", $mysqli->error);
} else {
printf("Current character set: %s\n", $mysqli->character_set_name());
}

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