Can't get the encoding to use UTF-8, even with the tag?

Question

I converted a Joomla 1.5 site to 2.5, and just about everything is going well, but I'm fighting the display of a character. On the live site there is text like `“You Agency guys are twisted.”`, and it displays fine, but on the converted site that same database article displays like `�You Agency guys are twisted.�`. Now, I've verified that the two elements have the exact same computed style. But it feels like a font issue. Is it maybe an issue with how Joomla 2.5 encodes that character? Edit 1 After the comments I went and verified the databse. I found that the `character_set_database` for the old database was `latin1` and not `utf8`, so I ran this statement: ``` alter database my_database default charset latin1; ``` and now all character set variables line up between the two database. Further, I verified that the character set for the page is `utf-8` because it's emitting this `` tag: ``` ``` However, the ch…

Accepted Answer

Try running this query before anything else:

```
mysql_query("SET NAMES 'utf8'");
```

The last time I had problems with character sets it was because even though everything else was in UTF-8 (the HTML being served, the code I wrote, the database tables, etc.), the database connection was still passing everything in another charset. This should fix that.

Edit: as mentioned by @null.point3r below, using the following code is a better alternative because escaped strings might otherwise still use the wrong encoding:

```
$mysqli->set_charset('utf8')
```

Can't get the encoding to use UTF-8, even with the <metadata> tag?

Solution

Problem