What are some common pitfalls when retrieving data from a UTF-8 database using ODBC in PHP?

When retrieving data from a UTF-8 database using ODBC in PHP, a common pitfall is not properly setting the character encoding for the connection. This can lead to issues with displaying special characters or non-ASCII characters correctly. To solve this, make sure to set the character encoding to UTF-8 when establishing the ODBC connection.

// Establish ODBC connection with UTF-8 character encoding
$dsn = "Driver={ODBC Driver 17 for SQL Server};Server=your_server;Database=your_database;";
$connection = odbc_connect($dsn, 'username', 'password');

// Set character encoding to UTF-8
odbc_exec($connection, "SET NAMES 'utf8'");

// Retrieve data from the database
$query = "SELECT * FROM your_table";
$result = odbc_exec($connection, $query);

// Display retrieved data
while ($row = odbc_fetch_array($result)) {
    echo $row['column_name'] . "<br>";
}

// Close the ODBC connection
odbc_close($connection);