What are the potential causes for additional characters like à to appear in MySQL when storing UTF-8 encoded data from a PHP form?

When additional characters like à appear in MySQL when storing UTF-8 encoded data from a PHP form, it is likely due to a mismatch in character encoding settings. To solve this issue, ensure that all components - PHP, MySQL, and HTML - are set to use UTF-8 encoding consistently. This can be done by setting the character set in the connection to MySQL and specifying the charset in the HTML meta tag.

// Set UTF-8 encoding for MySQL connection
$mysqli = new mysqli("localhost", "username", "password", "database");
$mysqli->set_charset("utf8");

// Set UTF-8 encoding for HTML output
header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8');
echo '<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">';