What are common issues with UTF-8 encoding in PHP databases and how can they be resolved?

Common issues with UTF-8 encoding in PHP databases include storing and retrieving data with special characters incorrectly, leading to garbled text or question mark symbols. To resolve this issue, make sure to set the character set to UTF-8 when connecting to the database, and also ensure that the database, tables, and columns are all set to use UTF-8 encoding. 

// Connect to the database with UTF-8 encoding
$servername = "localhost";
$username = "username";
$password = "password";
$dbname = "myDB";

$conn = new mysqli($servername, $username, $password, $dbname);
if ($conn->connect_error) {
    die("Connection failed: " . $conn->connect_error);
}

// Set UTF-8 encoding for the connection
$conn->set_charset("utf8");

// Set UTF-8 encoding for the database, tables, and columns
$sql = "ALTER DATABASE myDB CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci";
$conn->query($sql);

$sql = "ALTER TABLE myTable CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci";
$conn->query($sql);

$sql = "ALTER TABLE myTable MODIFY myColumn VARCHAR(255) CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci";
$conn->query($sql);

$conn->close();

Keywords

UTF-8 encoding PHP databases resolution

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