Character Encoding UTF-8: PHP, HTML,and MySQL

Note: Sequel Pro has not had a stable update in some time and I no longer use it.

I love Sequel Pro. However, the default encoding is latin1 and you should be using a form of Unicode like utf8mb4 and utf8mb4_unicode_ci. The next time you add a database with Sequel Pro, or any other client, be sure to select UTF-8 Unicode (utf8mb4) if you want to skip character encoding headaches.

Make proper character encoding a priority and understand how character encoding works. There is a PHP Roundtable on UTF-8 Encoding that will get you started. You can also watch this video about UTF8.

When and where to set UTF-8 Encoding

There are many places to set the character encoding for a PHP web application.

• In your HTML forms.
• HTML meta tag.
• HTTP Content-Type header
• In the DB scheme.
• In the DB connection itself.