What are best practices for handling Unicode text in PHP applications to ensure successful integration with a MySQL database?
When handling Unicode text in PHP applications to ensure successful integration with a MySQL database, it is important to set the character set and collation properly for both the database connection and the database tables. This ensures that the data is stored and retrieved correctly without any encoding issues. Additionally, using parameterized queries or prepared statements helps prevent SQL injection attacks and ensures that Unicode characters are handled properly.
// Set the character set and collation for the database connection
$mysqli = new mysqli("localhost", "username", "password", "database");
$mysqli->set_charset("utf8mb4");
// Set the character set and collation for the database table
$mysqli->query("SET NAMES 'utf8mb4'");
$mysqli->query("SET CHARACTER SET utf8mb4");
$mysqli->query("SET COLLATION_CONNECTION = 'utf8mb4_unicode_ci'");