UTF-8 Special Character Problems With MySQL

Short version:

Always use a query

SET NAMES <charset>

for instance, I used

SET NAMES utf8

before accessing the database. Preferably add it right after connecting to the database.

Long version:

For a several months I've been fighting with character sets. For some reason querying a UTF-8 MySQL database gave me different results than showing the database contents in phpMyAdmin or CocoaMySQL. Special characters, in this case, scandinavian ones, showed up either

all scrambled in database queries, yet quite perfectly in admin tools, or
perfectly in queries, but messed up in admin tools.

Because ASCII characters, that is, the majority of all used ones, show properly with pretty much any charset, I had been able to avoid facing this subject, or at least not finding an easy solution. Until today.

I realized this was going to be a whole lot of extra work that I did not want to charge from my clients. So I decided to fix this issue no matter what. After searching about half an hour I bumped into a blog entry that showed the solution. Fairly easy, eh? More info in MySQL Documentation.

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