Are there any best practices or guidelines for handling collation and character encoding issues when working with PHP and MySQL together?

When working with PHP and MySQL together, it's important to ensure that the collation and character encoding settings are consistent across both the database and the application. This can help prevent issues such as garbled text or incorrect sorting of data. One best practice is to set the character set and collation for both the database connection and the tables to a Unicode encoding like UTF-8. 

// Set the character set and collation for the database connection
$connection = new mysqli('localhost', 'username', 'password', 'database');
$connection->set_charset('utf8');

// Set the character set and collation for a specific table
$query = "ALTER TABLE table_name CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci";
$connection->query($query);

Keywords

collation character encoding PHP MySQL guidelines

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