Most of us have had problems with UTF-8 problems in PHP and MySQL. Here’s how to modify your database and table to be UTF-8 compliant. Most of the time we do set the character set to utf8 but forget to set the collation set to utf8.

Use the following MySQL statements to convert your database and tables:

ALTER DATABASE mydatabase
CHARACTER SET utf8
DEFAULT CHARACTER SET utf8
COLLATE utf8_general_ci
DEFAULT COLLATE utf8_general_ci ;

ALTER TABLE mytable
DEFAULT CHARACTER SET utf8
COLLATE utf8_general_ci ;