CodeIgniter config charset and UTF-8 support

Question

I'm working on a website which uses / stores accented characters in the database. I have the page template set so that the config.php charset variable matches the setting, e.g.: ``` ``` The problem I'm having is, when `$config['charset']` is set to UTF-8, the form validation fails and it's as if no characters were submitted if an accented character was included. So, for example, a required field will bounce back if á is included anywhere in the string. The string minus the á works fine. I've managed to get this working by changing the `$config['charset']` to ISO-8859-1 and converting text to UTF-8 before inserting / after retrieving from the database with php's `utf8_encode()` and `utf8_decode()`. Is this the best way or am I missing something needed in order to get UTF-8, with accented characters, working in CodeIgniter? Any advice appreciated.

Accepted Answer

You have to make sure that you use UTF-8 everywhere, and that both PHP and MySQL are configure to handle UTF-8.

In the html, add the meta-tag:

```
<meta charset="utf-8" />
```

And save it in UTF-8 format. here is how to do that in notepad++.

Define the MySQL tables to support UTF-8, create table with:

```
DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8;
```

And set the connection to:

```
mysql_set_charset('utf8', $con);
```

Enable UTF-8 in the `php.ini`:

```
default_charset = "utf-8"
```

For a full manual check Handling Unicode Front To Back In A Web App

CodeIgniter config charset and UTF-8 support

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