International Characters with PHP and MySQL

I'm currently writing an android application that pulls data from a MySQL database via a PHP script "API" and have come up against a problem whereby text that contains international characters with accents are replaced in my app with a question mark.  Fraçais comes out as Fran?ais.

After a fair bit of Google abuse and knowing that the solution lay somewhere in a UTF-8 character set, it came down to 2 things, and I thought I would share the solution for those who might also be struggling.

Firstly, I defined the utf-8 character set in the header response of my PHP API script:



header('Content-type: text/html; charset=utf-8');


That didn't work on its own, but it did solve the issue for characters that I manually echo'd from php, so I knew the problem had to be with the database.


I also had to define the character set for the database connection:



mysql_set_charset('utf8');


I defined this right after the connection to the database is made so that it applies to the last made connection.  You can also define a specific connection.

Zen Internet Offers 832Mbps ADSL Upload Option for £45 a month

It seems Zen Internet are really pushing the boundaries of ADSL broadband by offering an amazing 832Mbps upload speed on the business broadband service!  We contacted Zen for a comment and were told that "this is just the headline speed, we don't expect many people to actually achieve this", especially as it is faster than most  everyone elses download speed.  I'm sure the ASA would have a field day, or maybe it's just a typo ;-)