why do i have to use mb_convert_encoding($name,'ISO-8859-15','utf-8') to get accented chars to display?

Question

the data im working with here is off of a page that uses utf8 encoding

i've set my database and fields to use utf8_general_ci

now for whatever reason, i have to use the following code on the variable in order to have it display accented characters correctly in the database:

mb_convert_encoding($name,'ISO-8859-15','utf-8');

this makes no sense to me. why do i have to convert it to ISO-8859-15 when phpmyadmin is in utf8, the data is in utf8, and the database and table fields are in utf8?

Answer 1

You most likely have not set your database connection to UTF-8, so your database expects you to send ISO-8859 encoded data. See http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/charset-connection.html