title: Problems with character encodings in LAMP app - UTF-8 or not?
body: <p>I'm still learning the ropes with PHP &amp; MySQL and I know I'm doing something wrong here with how character sets are set up, but can't quite figure out from reading here and on the web what I should do.</p>
  
  <p>I have a standard LAMP installation with PHP 5, MySQL 5. I set everything up with the defaults. When some of my users input comments to our database some characters show up incorrectly - mostly apostrophes and em dashes at the moment. In MySQL apostrostrophes show up as â€™. They display on the page this way also (I'm using htmlentities to output user comments). </p>
  
  <p>In phpMyAdmin it says my MySQL Charset is UTF8-Unicode. </p>
  
  <p>In my database my tables are all set up with the default Latin1-Swedish-ci. </p>
  
  <p>My web pages all have meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" </p>
  
  <p>When I look at the site's http headers I see: Content-Type: text/html</p>
  
  <p>Like a newbie, I hadn't considered character sets at all until things started looking odd on some of my pages. So does it make most sense for me to convert everything to utf-8 and will this affect my PHP code? Or should I try to get it all into Latin? And do I have to go into the database and replace these odd codes, or will they magically display once I set up the charsets properly? All the fiddling I've done so far hasn't helped (I set the http headers to utf-8, and also tried latin). </p>