Date: 03/02/06 (PHP Community)    Keywords: no keywords

I have a script where the input form is used in China. Had a situation that rose up today where a chinese symbol somehow truncated the "<" of . This of course resulted in a big mess when the form was recalled (same form) from an administrative side.

Apparently, PHP and MySQL are set up on this server to deal with these characters in UTF8-Unicode. When the data is inserted in MySQL and I pull it up via say PHPmyAdmin, the jarbled characters have obviously been encoded because when the data is recalled, I get chinese in the form.

So, I guess the question is what is the best way to approach this problem? I tried utf8_encode and utf8_decode. Because MySQL is already set up with encoding these characters, I get ??? or nothing at all when the data is recalled. Obviously, I don't want characters to just dissapear through a filter, so what do you do? What function am I looking for?

Source: http://community.livejournal.com/php/421138.html