title: MySQL Database stores question marks instead of special characters
body: <p>I am trying to displaying VERY Special Characters (like    ) inside of my website, and storing it into my database.
  When I write special characters like those, they get once displayed, but when I reload the page and the server gets the string from the Database, it gets displayed as &quot;??????? ?????? ?????? ??????&quot;
  I tried to do a lot of things to fix this, but none of them worked.
  This isn't a visualization problem, because the header is set right:</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;meta charset=&quot;utf-8&quot;&gt;
  </code></pre>
  <p>What I did try to do:</p>
  <ul>
  <li>Setting the server's default charset to utf8.</li>
  <li>Setting the database/table/column collapse and charset to utf8mb4_unicode_ci</li>
  <li>Changing the connect string to:</li>
  </ul>
  
  <pre><code>$db = new mysqli(DB_HOST, DB_USER, DB_PASSWORD, DB_NAME);
  
  $db-&gt;query(&quot;SET character_set_results=utf8mb4&quot;);
  
  mb_language('uni'); 
  
  mb_internal_encoding('UTF-8');
  
  $db-&gt;query(&quot;SET NAMES utf8mb4&quot;);
  
  $db-&gt;set_charset('utf8mb4');
  </code></pre>
  <p>But nothing of this things worked.
  As an addition, I tried (Just for debugging) to change a string in the text field of the database to    , and I got an error:</p>
  <blockquote>
  <p>Warning: #1300 Invalid utf8 character string: 'F09D91'</p>
  <p>Warning: #1366 Incorrect string value: '\xF0\x9D\x91\xBB\xF0\x9D...' for column 'text' at row 1</p>
  </blockquote>
  <p>I tried really every solution I found here and outsite, but nothing worked.
  Any help would be appreciated.</p>