黑钻石问号

Question

if you look on this page: http://www.lyricsinger.org/lyric/michel-sardou/c-est-ma-vie

there are several black diamonds with question marks in them. these are french characters.

in the database, the TEXT field they are stored in is set to utf8_general_ci in the header you can see i have made the utf-8 charset declaration

it makes no sense why it isn't showing the characters properly.

Answer 1

It's important that you display the text with the same encoding as the source of the data. So for example, if you put the content in ISO-8859-1 (e.g in the admin part the encoding is ISO-8859-1, or the file you've loaded contains ISO-8859-1 content), it doesn't matter what the database collation is, the text will not be displayed correctly.