CakePHP UTF-8 required direct encoding?

Question

I wrote an application using CakePHP. I set everything to use UTF-8 encoding (the database tables, the database connection in database.php, etc.), now I'm wondering whether I should encode every single text string to UTF-8 (with utf8_encode) before sending it to the database or it isn't necessary.

Thank you.

Answer 1

That isn't necessary.

Specifying the database connection to utf8 will handle the complexities for you. (see comments)

Answer 2

Please have a look in the manual for what utf8_encode actually does. It converts ISO-8859-1 encoded text to UTF-8 encoded text. Yes, it's a horrible name for this function. If your text is not encoded in ISO-8859-1, you do not need this function. If your text is already in UTF-8, you do not need this function. In short, if you set everything to be UTF-8 from the beginning anyway, it's already UTF-8 and you do not need to do anything else.

Answer 3

It should be the problem of connecting php with mysql database. You can try fix this by making sure that your database server use utf-8 encoding connections by default .

You can force your cakephp application to connect to mysql with utf8 encoding by specifying encoding option in the app/config/database.php:

var $default = array(
    'driver' => 'mysql',
    'persistent' => false,
    'host' => 'localhost',
    'login' => 'root',
    'password' => '',
    'database' => 'cakephp',
    'prefix' => '',
    'encoding' => 'utf8'
);

You can also force mysql to use utf8 with a query:

SET NAMES 'utf8'

Let me know if you can solve the problem. Thanks