Encoding characters in mySQL

[PhantomMask]

I’ve just upgraded mySQL on my server from a very old system to the latest and now I’m finding it strips out characters when they are greater than ASCII 127. This new version has something called “Collation” that I have never encountered before. I think mine is set to “utf8_general_ci”. Anyway, here is my query that I’m using in PHP to add data to my DB:

 

INSERT INTO 'mytable' (message) VALUES ('$message')

It use to work fine before but now with the new version of mySQL, it’s faling when I add special charecters as those listed below

 

Hello World

Accented áéíóúó VVVVV

Apostrophe 1 "" WWWW

Apostrophe 2 '' XXXXX

Apostrophe 3 “” YYYYY

Apostrophe 4 ‘’ ZZZZZ

The quick brown fox kicks the butt of the lazy dog

Now, if I add the above text in to the DB, only the following gets inserted:

 

Hello World

Accented

As the DB removes all of the special characters.

Can anyone advise me?

 

I’m not a mySQL expert and these pages are not helping:

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql/en/Charset.html

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql/en/Charset-CONVERT.html

 

Any advice will be much appreciated.

Thank you kindly.

[PhantomMask]

Anyone?