Weird character encoding behavior

[rawb]

Ok I've got kind of a weird character encoding problem that I'm going to try to describe as best I can .  Basically, I'm having a lot of trouble rendering French characters and there seems to be a general consensus (on google) that utf-8 is the way to go for French.

 

The MySQL database is set up to use the 'utf8_general_ci' collation, and my HTML also uses utf-8 character encoding like so:

 

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=utf-8" />

 

The Problem:

 

When using the utf-8 character encoding on my html pages, everything appears to work perfectly.  However, when I go to PHPMyAdmin and check the database, it inserts weird characters ('é' instead of 'é', for example).

 

When using the 'ISO-8859-1' charset on my HTML pages, everything inserts and retrieves correctly (this is what I'm currently doing).

 

The thing is, I would really like to use the utf-8 charset in my HTML to keep things consistent between my database and my HTML.  If this charset is supposed to be able to support French, then why is it doing this?

 

Thanks in advance!

[lyxus]

I have exactly the same problem any way how i can clean my database. I can use a windows or Unix client does not matter.

And which encoding should use !

Thanks

 

[fenway]

So there's nothing wrong with the db... make sure PHPMyAdmin is correctly configured, I suppose.