php - Accented characters stored in MySQL database

Question

I have a webapp that stores French text -- which potentially includes accented characters -- in a MySQL database. When data is retrieved directly through PHP, accented characters become gibbirish. For instance: qui r?fl?te la liste.

Hence, I use htmlentities() (or htmlspecialchars() ) to convert the string to html entities, and all is fine. However, when I come to output data that contains both accented characters and HTML elements, things get more complicated. For instance, <strong> is converted to <strong> and therefore not understood by the browser.

How can I simultaneously get accented characters displayed correctly and my HTML parsed correctly?

Thank you!

Answer 1

Maybe you could take a look to utf8_encode() and utf8_decode()