I am converting a spreadsheet using PHPExcel to a Database and the cell value happens to contain Russian. If I run mb_detect_encoding() I am told the text is UTF8 and if I set a header of UTF8 then I see the correct Russian characters.
However if I compile it into a string (with only addslashes involved in the process) and insert it into the table I see lots of ????. I have set the table characterset as utf8mb4 and also set the collation as utf8mb4_general_ci. I have also run $this->db->query("SET NAMES 'utf8mb4'"); on my DB connection.
I run PDO query() with my multi part insert and get the ???s but if I output the query to screen I get ÐŸÐ¾Ñ which would be valid UTF8. Why would this not be stored correctly in the database?