UTF-8 encoded html pages show questions marks instead of characters

Question

I have the standard XAMPP installation on win7  x64   Having had my share of encoding troubles in a past project where mysql encoding did not match with the php enconding which in turn sometimes output html in other encodings  I decided to consistently encode everything using utf-8   I m just getting started with the html markup and am allready experiencing troubles    My page is saved using utf-8  no BOM  I think    update  It turns out this was NOT the case  The file was actually saved with ISO 8859-1  I later found this out thanks to Sherm Pendleys answer  I had to go back and change my project settings  which were set to  ISO-8859-1   to the desired  UTF-8   php is set per  htaccess to serve  php-pages in utf-8 with  AddCharset UTF-8  php html has a meta tag specifying   lt meta http-equiv  Content-Type  content  text html  charset utf-8    gt  To test I set used php header  Content-Type text html  charset UTF-8      The page is evidently served in utf-8  firefox and chrome recognize it as such  but any special characters such as        or    will just show as    Also when viewing the source code   When dropping the encoding settings mentioned above all characters are rendered correctly but the encoding that is detected shows either windows-1252 or ISO-8859-1 depending on the browser   How come  I m very puzzled  I would have expected the exact opposite behavior  Any advice is welcome  thanks   edit  Hopefully this helps a bit more  This is the response header  as per firebug   HTTP 1 1 200 OK Date  Sat  26 Mar 2011 20 49 44 GMT Server  Apache 2 2 14  Win32  DAV 2 mod ssl 2 2 14 OpenSSL 0 9 8l mod autoindex color PHP 5 3 1 mod apreq2-20090110 2 7 1 mod perl 2 0 4 Perl v5 10 1 X-Powered-By  PHP 5 3 1 Content-Length  91 Keep-Alive  timeout 5  max 99 Connection  Keep-Alive Content-Type  text html  charset utf-8

User · Accepted Answer

When  dropping  the encoding settings   mentioned above all characters    are rendered  correctly but   the encoding that is detected shows   either windows-1252 or ISO-8859-1   depending on the browser    Then that s what you re really sending  None of the encoding settings in your bullet list will actually modify your output in any way  all they do is tell the browser what encoding to assume when interpreting what you send  That s why you re getting those  s - you re telling the browser that what you re sending is UTF-8  but it s really ISO-8859-1

User · Answer

Check if any of your  php files which printing some text  also is correctly encoding in utf-8

User · Answer

In my case  database returned latin1  when my browser expected utf8   So for MySQLi I did    mysqli set charset  dblink   utf8          See http   php net manual en mysqli set-charset php for more info

User · Answer

Tell PDO your charset initially     something like  PDO  mysql host  host dbname  DB name charset utf8     username   password     Notice the  charset utf8  part   hope it helps

User · Answer

I m from Brazil and I create my data bases using latin1 spanish ci  For the html and everything else I use   charset ISO-8859-1   The data goes right with       and       Sometimes I have to put the texts of the html using the code of it  such as   Ol amp aacute    gives me  Ol     You can find the codes in this page  http   www ascii cl htmlcodes htm  Hope this helps  I remember it was REALLY annoying

User · Answer

Looks like nobody mentioned  SET NAMES utf8    I found this solution here and it helped me  How to apply it      To be all UTF-8  issue the following statement just after you   ve made the connection to the database server     SET NAMES utf8    Maybe this will help someone

User · Answer

The problem is the charset that is being used by apache to serve the pages  I work with Linux  so I don t know anything about XAMPP  I had the same problem too  what I did to solve the problem was to add the charset to the charset config file  It is commented by default     In my case I have it in  etc apache2 conf d charset but  since you re using Windows the location is different  So I m giving you this like an idea of how to solve it   At the end  my charset config file is like this     Read the documentation before enabling AddDefaultCharset    In general  it is only a good idea if you know that all your files   have this encoding  It will override any encoding given in the files   in meta http-equiv or xml encoding tags   AddDefaultCharset UTF-8   I hope it helps

[php] UTF-8 encoded html pages show ? (questions marks) instead of characters

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