Character Sets not working? Please advise

[Perad]

Hello,

 

Having a torrid time here. The site is Portuguese.

 

The MySQL character set is ut8, the collation is ut8_general_ci

 

In the database i have this word. 'MATENÇÃO'.

 

It appears correctly in phpMyAdmin

 

When it outputs to the webpage it becomes distorted.

 

There are several things which I do not understand here.

 

If I write this page into my default template file. (main_page.php) it works. It displays fine.

 

If I write this word into my header file (header.php), it becomes distorted.

 

If I echo this word instead of calling it from the database it displays correctly.

 

The page in question can found here. 69.89.31.108/~nortavia/ntv/

 

Please check the various comments above the page, in the nav menu and below the menu.

 

Do you have any idea what is going on?

[thebadbad]

First of all, you're setting the wrong charset in your HTML meta tag:

 

<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />

 

It should be:

 

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

 

And a second thing; when connecting to your database, you'll have to set names and character set to UTF-8 in MySQL:

 

<?php
//connect to DB
$connection = mysql_connect($db_host, $db_user, $db_pass) or die('Error connecting to database.');
//select DB
mysql_select_db($db_name, $connection) or die('Error selecting database.');
//set names and character set to UTF-8
mysql_query("SET NAMES 'utf8'", $connection);
mysql_query('SET CHARACTER SET utf8', $connection);
?>

[Axeia]

I summed up the steps I could remember I took myself to get it working in another thread about the same subject so you may want to take a look at it.