What is the reason for needing to use utf8_decode prior to inserting a UTF8 string into MySQL?

I encountered a perplexing issue that I was able to resolve by experimenting with different options. However, the solution doesn't quite make sense to me...

Here's the scenario: I am receiving JSON data from Facebook encoded in UTF-8. My database table is set to utf8_general_ci and my DB connection is also UTF-8 encoded.

If I simply insert the string without any modifications, it shows up as:

Fabién

But when I apply utf8_decode before insertion, it appears correctly as:

Fabién

Even though mb_detect_encoding confirms that the string is already in UTF-8 format.

Can anyone shed light on why utf8_decode seems necessary for this operation to work? Alternatively, are there ways to modify my code so that utf8_decode is not required?

Thank you in advance.

phpjsonutf-8

Answer №1

If the character encoding of your database/table/field is set to utf8_general_ci and the input string is in UTF-8 format, there is no need to convert the string before inserting it.

However, when retrieving data from the database for HTML display, you should use the following code to convert the UTF-8 encoded string to Latin1 (iso-8859-1) format:

 mb_convert_encoding($retrieved_string, 'utf-8', 'iso-8859-1')

Answer №2

Identified the issue; it is necessary to run the command "SET NAMES utf8" after connecting to the database using PDO. In my case, I am working with an outdated version of PHP (5.3.6), where charset=utf8 is not recognized in the connection string...

For more information, refer to this query: PHP PDO: charset, set names?

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