What are the best practices for handling special characters like ü, ä, ö in PHP when querying a database for geographical data?

Special characters like ü, ä, ö can cause issues when querying a database for geographical data if the database or the PHP script is not properly configured to handle UTF-8 encoding. To solve this issue, it is important to ensure that the database, table, and column collation are set to utf8mb4_unicode_ci, and that the PHP script sets the connection character set to UTF-8 before querying the database. 

// Set the connection character set to UTF-8
$mysqli = new mysqli("localhost", "username", "password", "database");
$mysqli->set_charset("utf8");

// Query the database for geographical data
$query = "SELECT * FROM locations WHERE city = 'München'";
$result = $mysqli->query($query);

// Fetch and display the results
while ($row = $result->fetch_assoc()) {
    echo $row['city'] . "<br>";
}

// Close the database connection
$mysqli->close();

Keywords

UTF-8 htmlentities htmlspecialchars mysqli_real_escape_string mb_convert_encoding

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