PHP PDO with Special Characters

Question

I am using PDO for MySQL database connection, selecting, updating and deleting. But I have a problem with selecting rows with special characters, for instance, I want to select a page title with 'Judge-Fürstová Mila', Table `page`, ``` id title content 1 Judge-Fürstová Mila xxx ``` SQL, ``` SELECT * FROM page WHERE title = 'Judge-Fürstová Mila' ``` Returns result if I query via phpmyadmin. But it return `0` with PDO, ``` $sql = ' SELECT * FROM page WHERE title = ?'; $items = $connection->fetch_assoc($sql,'Judge-Fürstová Mila'); ``` Below is my db class, ``` class database_pdo { # database handler protected $connection = null; # make a connection public function __construct($dsn,$username,$password) { try { # MySQL with PDO_MYSQL $this->connection = new PDO($dsn, $username, $password); $this->connection->setAttribute(PDO::ATTR_ERRMODE, PDO::ERRMODE_EXCEPTION); } catch (PDOException $e) { # call the get_error function $this->get_error($e); } } # don't forget to add getter method to get…

Accepted Answer

Try to add `charset=UTF-8` in your `$dsn`, and change

```
$this->connection = new PDO($dsn, $username, $password);
```

to

```
$this->connection = new PDO($dsn, $username, $password, array(PDO::MYSQL_ATTR_INIT_COMMAND => "SET NAMES utf8"));
```

I believe it is that `SET NAMES utf8` thingie, at least it was in my case

PHP PDO with Special Characters

Solution

Problem