MySQL encoding issue

Question

For some reason, my mysql table is converting single and double quotes into strange characters. E.g

"aha"

is changed into:

“aha†

How can I fix this, or detect this in PHP and decode everything??

Answer 1

It seems that the UTF-8 encoded string “aha” (binary 0xE2809C 0x61 0x68 0x61 0xE2809D) is interpreted with Windows-1252. There this byte sequence represents the character sequence “ahaâ€.

Answer 2

The encoding of your mysql client and your server don't match. Use SET NAMES to match the character set of the connection to the one used in your PHP files.