title: HTML Character Encoding to accept UTF-8
body: <p>I'm working on a website for a client who's located in Brazil. A section of his website shows feedback/reviews from users.</p>
  
  <p>Here is an example:</p>
  
  <p><strong>Correct Version:</strong></p>
  
  <p>"Três aprovados em menos de dois minutos!"</p>
  
  <p>When I output to the user, this is whats showing:</p>
  
  <p><strong>Incorrect Version:</strong></p>
  
  <p>"TrÃªs aprovados em menos de dois minutos!"</p>
  
  <p>I'm saving these reviews to a mySQL database (Hostgator) and I've set my database collation to "utf8_unicode_ci".</p>
  
  <p>At the top of my HTML decument, I've declared this:</p>
  
  <p><div class="snippet" data-lang="js" data-hide="false">
  <div class="snippet-code">
  <pre class="snippet-code-html lang-html prettyprint-override"><code>&lt;!DOCTYPE html&gt;
  &lt;html lang="pt-BR" class="fixed"&gt;
  &lt;head&gt;
      &lt;title&gt;@yield("title")&lt;/title&gt;
      &lt;!-- Basic --&gt;
      &lt;meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8"&gt;
  &lt;/head&gt;
    &lt;body&gt;
      &lt;!-- Rest of the page is here --&gt;
    &lt;/body&gt;
  &lt;/html&gt;</code></pre>
  </div>
  </div>
  </p>
  
  <p>I'm using Laravel 5 to grab my data from the DB and I display it like so:</p>
  
  <pre><code>{{ mb_convert_encoding($feedback-&gt;message, "UTF-8") }}
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Funny thing is, if I use the code above on my localhost, the correct "review"
  is shown. But once I upload it to hostgator, the "review" is not shown correctly.</p>
  
  <p>If I change it to "{{ mb_convert_encoding($feedback->message, "auto") }}", the correct "review" is shown on uploaded page but on my localhost, the wrong "review" is shown.</p>
  
  <p>I've never ran into this issue before!
  <s>When I get phpinfo on the clients hostgator page, it shows that "default_charset" is set to "null"</p>
  
  <p>Could that be the issue?</s></p>
  
  <p>Thanks!</p>
  
  <h3>UPDATE</h3>
  
  <p>I've fixed the "default_charset" to "UTF-8" and I still have the same issue.</p>
  
  <p>Here's the response header</p>
  
  <pre>
  Cache-Control:no-cache
  Connection:Keep-Alive
  Content-Type:text/html; charset=UTF-8
  Date:Fri, 18 Sep 2015 19:36:29 GMT
  Keep-Alive:timeout=5, max=75
  Server:Apache
  Set-Cookie:XSRF-TOKEN=[hidden]; expires=Fri, 18-Sep-2015 21:36:29 GMT; Max-Age=7200; path=/
  Set-Cookie:laravel_session=[hidden]; expires=Fri, 18-Sep-2015 21:36:29 GMT; Max-Age=7200; path=/; httponly
  Transfer-Encoding:chunked
  </pre>
  
  <p>Heres my Database Configuration:</p>
  
  <pre>
   PDO::FETCH_CLASS,
  
      /*
      |--------------------------------------------------------------------------
      | Default Database Connection Name
      |--------------------------------------------------------------------------
      |
      | Here you may specify which of the database connections below you wish
      | to use as your default connection for all database work. Of course
      | you may use many connections at once using the Database library.
      |
      */
  
      'default' => env('DB_CONNECTION', 'mysql'),
  
      /*
      |--------------------------------------------------------------------------
      | Database Connections
      |--------------------------------------------------------------------------
      |
      | Here are each of the database connections setup for your application.
      | Of course, examples of configuring each database platform that is
      | supported by Laravel is shown below to make development simple.
      |
      |
      | All database work in Laravel is done through the PHP PDO facilities
      | so make sure you have the driver for your particular database of
      | choice installed on your machine before you begin development.
      |
      */
  
      'connections' => [
  
          'sqlite' => [
              'driver'   => 'sqlite',
              'database' => storage_path('database.sqlite'),
              'prefix'   => '',
          ],
  
          'mysql' => [
              'driver'    => 'mysql',
              'host'      => env('DB_HOST', 'localhost'),
              'database'  => env('DB_DATABASE', 'forge'),
              'username'  => env('DB_USERNAME', 'forge'),
              'password'  => env('DB_PASSWORD', ''),
              'charset'   => 'utf8',
              'collation' => 'utf8_unicode_ci',
              'prefix'    => '',
              'strict'    => false,
          ],
  
          'pgsql' => [
              'driver'   => 'pgsql',
              'host'     => env('DB_HOST', 'localhost'),
              'database' => env('DB_DATABASE', 'forge'),
              'username' => env('DB_USERNAME', 'forge'),
              'password' => env('DB_PASSWORD', ''),
              'charset'  => 'utf8',
              'prefix'   => '',
              'schema'   => 'public',
          ],
  
          'sqlsrv' => [
              'driver'   => 'sqlsrv',
              'host'     => env('DB_HOST', 'localhost'),
              'database' => env('DB_DATABASE', 'forge'),
              'username' => env('DB_USERNAME', 'forge'),
              'password' => env('DB_PASSWORD', ''),
              'charset'  => 'utf8',
              'prefix'   => '',
          ],
  
      ],
  
      /*
      |--------------------------------------------------------------------------
      | Migration Repository Table
      |--------------------------------------------------------------------------
      |
      | This table keeps track of all the migrations that have already run for
      | your application. Using this information, we can determine which of
      | the migrations on disk haven't actually been run in the database.
      |
      */
  
      'migrations' => 'migrations',
  
      /*
      |--------------------------------------------------------------------------
      | Redis Databases
      |--------------------------------------------------------------------------
      |
      | Redis is an open source, fast, and advanced key-value store that also
      | provides a richer set of commands than a typical key-value systems
      | such as APC or Memcached. Laravel makes it easy to dig right in.
      |
      */
  
      'redis' => [
  
          'cluster' => false,
  
          'default' => [
              'host'     => '127.0.0.1',
              'port'     => 6379,
              'database' => 0,
          ],
  
      ],
  
  ];
  </pre>