php - UTF-8 problem when saving to mysql

Question

My website is using charset iso 8859 1

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />

when user post chinese character, it will be saved into the database as & # 2 0 3 2 0 ; & # 2 2 9 0 9 ; which will output as the chinese character when retrieved.

I need to set my website to UTF-8

when user post chinese character, it will be saved as some funky character in the mysql, and when retrieved, some characters are correct but some are wrong.

my question is, after i set to UTF-8, how to i make mysql save the text as # 2 0 3 2 0 ; & # 2 2 9 0 9 ; instead of funky chars.

i tried to use htmlentities. it's not working correctly.

my script is using

$message = htmlentities(strip_tags(mysql_real_escape_string($_POST['message']),'<img><vid>')); 

when it's saved to mysql it is like this 你好 when it's retrieved to be display is like this ?? ?￥? <---- is the funky character that is stored in mysql previously

Answer 1

i been seeing lots of encoding related issues the owner should google a bit before posting

general check list:

1. mysql table schema to use utf-8
2. mysql clients connection to use utf-8 mysql --default-character-set=utf8
3. php mysqli_set_charset to utf-8
4. html encoding to utf-8
5. putty, emac clients... to be in utf-8