Cant insert utf8 characters on mysql (with utf8 collation, charset and nameset)

Question

im facing a really stressing problem here.. i have everything in UTF-8 , all my DB and tables are utf8_general_ci but when trying to insert or update from a single PHP script all i see are symbols.. but if i edit in phpmyadmin the words are shown correctly.. i found that if i run the utf8_decode() function to my strings in php i can make it work, but im not planning to do that because is a mess and it should work without doing that :S

Here is a basic code im using to test this:

<?php
$conn=mysql_connect("localhost","root","root") 
  or die("Error");
mysql_select_db("mydb",$conn) or
  die("Error");
mysql_query("UPDATE `mydb`.`Clients` SET `name` = '".utf8_decode("Araña")."' WHERE `Clients`.`id` =25;", 
   $conn) or die(mysql_error());
mysql_close($conn);
echo "Success.";
?>

This is what i get if i dont decode utf8 with php utf8_decode function:

instead of Araña, i get : Araña

Answer 1

I've run into the same issue many times. Sometimes it's because the type of database link I'm selecting from isn't the same type that I'm using for inserting and other times, it's from file data into a database.

For the later instance, mysql_set_charset('utf8',$link); is the magic answer.

Place the call to mysql_set_charset just after you select your database via mysql_select_db.

@ref http://php.net/manual/en/function.mysql-set-charset.php