MySQL data contains special characters like š and ć, but they are displayed as '?' on the web page. Why?

I am trying to retrieve a row from the table which contains the value Boris Borenović.

Instead, Boris Borenovi? is returned.

Both my MySQL database and table have utf8_unicode_ci collation set.

My PHP page, which displays data from the table, contains the following header: <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />. I tried with charset=utf-8 as well, but it still doesn't work.

The Sql command I am using to query data from the table is SELECT * FROM contact, so nothing special there, just boring plain query. I tried with开发者_C百科 SELECT * FROM contact COLLATE Latin1_General_CI but that query can't be executed.

How do I make it work? Thanks.

Here is the answer: can't insert russian text into mysql database You need to configure MySQL to allow utf-8

Have you set your connection collation? Try executing SET NAMES utf8 to set all collations to utf-8, then set your charset to utf-8 as well prior to executing the select statement.

<?php

  $mysql_host = "localhost";

  $mysql_db = "database";
  $mysql_user = "username";
  $mysql_pass = "password";

  $mysql_character = "latin1";
  $mysql_collate = "latin1_bin";

  $db = mysql_connect($mysql_host, $mysql_user, $mysql_pass);
  if(!$db) echo "Cannot connect to the database!";

  mysql_select_db($mysql_db);
  mysql_query("ALTER DATABASE `".$mysql_db."` DEFAULT CHARACTER SET '".$mysql_character."' COLLATE '".$mysql_collate."'");
  $query = mysql_query("SHOW TABLES");
  while($row = mysql_fetch_array($query)) {
    $table = $row[0];
    mysql_query("ALTER TABLE `".$table."` DEFAULT CHARACTER SET '".$mysql_character."' COLLATE '".$mysql_collate."'");

    $query2 = mysql_query("SHOW columns FROM `".$table."`");
    while($row = mysql_fetch_array($query2)) {
      $column = $row[0];
      $type = $row[1];
      $null = $row[2];
      if($null == "YES") $null = "NULL";
      if($null == "NO") $null = "NOT NULL";
      mysql_query("ALTER TABLE `".$table."` CHANGE COLUMN `".$column."` `".$column."` ".$type." CHARACTER SET '".$mysql_character."' COLLATE '".$mysql_collate."' ".$null);
    }
  }

?>

Your database is perfectly fine. If you was seeing ? inside the database itself, then it would have meant that the database table encoding is wrong.

Since you're seeing ? in the HTTP response, then it means that PHP isn't been instructed to write characters as UTF-8 to the response. Check step 3 of this PHP UTF-8 cheatsheet.

If you're then seeing for example Å¡ instead of š, then you need to execute mysql_set_charset with utf8 prior to the SELECT as well.

My way is:

mysql_query("SET CHARACTER SET 'utf8'");
mysql_query("SET NAMES 'UTF8'");
mysql_query("SET CHARACTER SET_CLIENT='UTF8'");

Put this code after you connect on database

(mysql_select_db($Database);)