Background Knowledge

The MySQL database v4.0.23 is using the default character set of “Latin1″. When the database was created I had no knowledge of character sets other wise it would have been “UTF-8″.
The web pages are using a character set of “UTF-8″.

Problem

Data being queried from a MySQL database that contains French accent characters will not render correctly in the browser even after applying PHP htmlentities().

Example code: $string = htmlentities($string , ENT_QUOTES, “UTF-8″);

Solution

The queried data from the database was inputted using the character set “ISO-8859-1″. I found this out by changing the browser’s character encoding to “Western ISO-8859-1″ and the French accent characters then rendered properly. With the use of PHP iconv() I was able to convert the data from “ISO-8859-1″ to “UTF-8″ character set and the French characters then rendered properly in the browser.

Example code: $string = iconv(“ISO-8859-1″,”UTF-8″,”$string”);

If you are unaware of what MySQL default character set being used, you can run this SQL command “show variables like “%character%” and check your MySQL configuration file. Refer to the MySQL manual for further details.