How Can I Fix Garbled Characters (like \'î\') Caused by Malformed UTF-8 Encoding in PHP and MySQL?

Correcting Malformed UTF-8 Encoding

In PHP 5 and MySQL environments, corrupted UTF-8 encoding can manifest as garbled characters like "î". To rectify this issue, consider employing the following strategies:

Addressing the Database Collation:

• Ensure that the database collation is set to "utf8_general_ci" or a similar UTF-8-compatible collation.

Verifying PHP Configuration:

• Confirm that the PHP script includes an appropriate UTF-8 header, such as "Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8".

Checking Text Editor Settings:

• Set Notepad to use UTF-8 encoding without the Byte Order Mark (BOM).

Mapping Corrupted Characters:

• Create a customized function that identifies and replaces corrupted character sequences (e.g., "î") with their correct UTF-8 equivalents.

Utilizing Database Dump/Restore:

• Perform a full database dump using the following command:

mysqldump -h DB_HOST -u DB_USER -p DB_PASSWORD --opt --quote-names \
    --skip-set-charset --default-character-set=latin1 DB_NAME > DB_NAME-dump.sql

• Restore the database using the following command:

mysql -h DB_HOST -u DB_USER -p DB_PASSWORD \
    --default-character-set=utf8 DB_NAME < DB_NAME-dump.sql

Note that this solution is most effective for cases of double-encoded UTF-8 characters (e.g., smart quotes, dashes, etc.). It is essential to verify the specific character encoding issues in your case before applying any fixes.

The above is the detailed content of How Can I Fix Garbled Characters (like \'î\') Caused by Malformed UTF-8 Encoding in PHP and MySQL?. For more information, please follow other related articles on the PHP Chinese website!