What are the potential pitfalls of not specifying the charset in the PDO connection string for PHP?

Not specifying the charset in the PDO connection string for PHP can lead to unexpected character encoding issues, such as displaying garbled text or special characters incorrectly. To avoid this problem, it is recommended to explicitly set the charset when establishing the database connection using PDO. 

$dsn = 'mysql:host=localhost;dbname=mydatabase;charset=utf8';
$username = 'username';
$password = 'password';

try {
    $pdo = new PDO($dsn, $username, $password);
    // Set the PDO connection to use UTF-8 charset
    $pdo->exec("set names utf8");
} catch (PDOException $e) {
    echo 'Connection failed: ' . $e->getMessage();
}

Keywords

PDO charset connection string encoding data corruption

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