UTF-8 input problems with Adminer and phpmyadmin

Question

I recently switched my MariaDB database to UTF-8 from Latin1. Read a bunch of checklists and carefully updated my character set, collation, my.cnf and php.ini. I have php forms for most of my data entry on the site, but sometimes for quick little changes, it's easier to go into a program like Adminer or phpmyadmin.

With the UTF-8 in place, I wanted to change director Alfonso Cuaron's name to Cuarón. I went to his entry in Adminer. Edit. Cuar[alt+0243]n. It showed in the edit box as Cuarón. But when I saved the change, Adminer showed it as Cuarón. Okay. Looked at page info in Firefox. Says the character encoding of the page is UTF-8. So all should be well, right?

I went to one of my php data entry forms and created a Bob Cuarón. It showed up fine. I SSH'd into the server fired up a mysql command line and ran an update sql line with Cuarón. That worked. But trying to change it in Adminer still kept giving me Cuarón. I installed phpmyadmin (which was giving me some issues with my nginx config) but I was able to edit his name and...sigh...it too gave me Cuarón. I installed SQLbuddy and...success...I was able to make the changes, but the program is lacking some of the things I need, like the ability to edit search results.

I'm sure I've nailed everything down:

nginx.conf:

charset UTF-8;

my.cnf:

[client]
default-character-set=utf8
[mysqld]
character-set-server=utf8
collation-server=utf8_general_ci
init-connect='SET NAMES utf8'

/etc/php5/fpm/php.ini

mbstring.language               = Neutral
mbstring.internal_encoding      = UTF-8  
mbstring.encoding_translation   = On     
mbstring.http_input             = auto   
mbstring.http_output            = UTF-8  
mbstring.detect_order           = auto   
mbstring.substitute_character   = none   
default_charset                 = UTF-8

SHOW VARIABLES LIKE "%character_set%";

+--------------------------+----------------------------+
| Variable_name            | Value                      |
+--------------------------+----------------------------+
| character_set_client     | utf8                       |
| character_set_connection | utf8                       |
| character_set_database   | utf8                       |
| character_set_filesystem | binary                     |
| character_set_results    | utf8                       |
| character_set_server     | utf8                       |
| character_set_system     | utf8                       |
| character_sets_dir       | /usr/share/mysql/charsets/ |

I can't see what I could be missing. Both Adminer and phpmyadmin handle UTF-8 so I don't know why it's not working. It worked right out of the box with SQLBuddy, but as I said it's missing some features.

Any thoughts where I should look?

Answer 1

UPDATE: turns out that an article I had read (forgot to bookmark, sorry) on UTF-8 migrations had me change some of the mbstring setting away from PHP's defaults. Someone at adminer noticed that and all was good. See their response here:

https://sourceforge.net/p/adminer/discussion/960418/thread/33595373/#42df