I have been poring over stackoverflow all night looking for a way to solve my issues, but I absolutely cannot get the browser to display my Unicode characters correctly when pulling them from my database. In particular, I am trying to use the "combining macron" character (U+0304), added after a character to put a macron over it. I want the user to have the option to turn them on and off, and having one character to look for and ignore seems easier to accomplish this than instead of making conversions between individual macroned letters and their non-macroned counterpart (e.g. Ā -> A).
It would be trivial to use the HTML entity (& #772;) to accomplish this, but if I were to use the MySQL database for something other than making a webpage I want it to be easily transferable. I have tested with the HTML entity and I can get it to successfully add a macron to the previous character.
However, when using the Unicode character in my MySQL table, I absolutely cannot get it to print anything other than question marks (?) in the browser. In the table itself, the entry is a VARCHAR(64) and looks like 'word¯' with the macron appearing afterwards, but I assume that's just a limitation of the cmd environment that it doesn't put the macron over the d. The column Collation is latin1_swedish_ci, if that makes a difference. Here is what I have tried to get the entry to print correctly:
Changing my php.ini to have a default charset of utf-8
Making the top of my php file read:
<?php
header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8');
?>
And setting the first parameter of my database PDO as mysql:dbname=NAME;host=localhost;charset=utf8'
When I simply make the php file echo the character I want, it prints to the page correctly. So I'm thinking the problem isn't with the encoding? Or maybe the encoding of the database and the server aren't the same and that is creating the ??
EDIT: I can get it to correctly display if I insert the value from PhPMyAdmin, but not when I enter it through the cmd. In both cases I am pasting the same word with an ending character of 'U+0304'. Is there a reason that it works with PHPMyAdmin and not through a direct query, and what can I do so it works with both?
