title: How to take unicode characters from the mysql data base in PHP
body: <p>I am developing a local website which gives information in local language. In my MySQL database , there is a table called pageContent and it has a column called "text". that "text"  column type is text and <strong>collation is utf8_sinhala_ci</strong></p>
  
  <p><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/nLQQz.jpg" alt="enter image description here"> </p>
  
  <p>In MySQL it displays the fonts normally:</p>
  
  <p><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/AJIKp.jpg" alt="enter image description here"></p>
  
  <p>But when I take it in to PHP page and echo the value, then it shows question marks like <code>??????????</code>.</p>
  
  <p><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/a5AOW.jpg" alt="enter image description here"></p>
  
  <p>But if I hard code something and echo, then it displays normally in PHP page also.</p>
  
  <p><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/QCQmS.jpg" alt="enter image description here"></p>
  
  <p>I feel something goes wrong when I take values from the database. But I couldn’t found the error.
  I have tried following codes also.</p>
  
  <pre><code>mysql_query ("set collation_connection='utf8_sinhala_ci'"); 
    $result =  mysqli_query($this-&gt;connecDB,"SELECT * FROM pageContent");  
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>But that doesn’t work.</p>