Question mark characters displaying within text, why is this?

Question

I have a backup server that automatically backs up my live site, both files and database.

On the live site, the text looks fine, but when you view the mirrored version of it, it displays '?' within some of the text. This text is stored within the news database table.

Here is a screen shot of it being on the live server and of it on the mirrored server.

What could happen within the process of backing it up to the mirrored server?

Answer 1

The following articles will be useful

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/charset-syntax.html

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/charset-connection.html

After you connect to the database issue the following command:

SET NAMES 'utf8';

Ensure that your web page also uses the UTF-8 encoding:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />

PHP also offers several function that will be useful for conversions:

http://us3.php.net/manual/en/function.iconv.php

http://us.php.net/mb_convert_encoding