What could break charsets between database and display?

Question

I am using a MySQL database to store some strings which contain German umlauts (äüö). The table "testtable" and the column "text" are utf8_bin collated, and PHPMyAdmin tells me the "MySQL connection" is also utf8_bin.

I then use a PHP script to read the strings and display them:

$sql = "SELECT `text` FROM `testtable` WHERE `id`=$id";

$db = mysql_connect(MYSQL_HOST, MYSQL_USER, MYSQL_PASS, false);
mysql_select_db(MYSQL_DATABASE,$db);

$result = mysql_query($sql,$db);
if (!$result or mysql_errno()) die("Something was wrong with the query: $sql");

$rows = array();
while(($rows[] = mysql_fetch_assoc($result)) || array_pop($rows));

foreach ($rows as $r) {echo $r['text']}

The file itself is encoded in utf-8 according to my editor, and the page is declared as utf-8 in the head:

<meta charset="utf-8">

Yet, the text "This is a testmessage äüöß" in the database is displayed as "This is a testmessage ����". When I write umlauts directly into the HTML of the PHP file, or echo umlauts directly, they are displayed correctly, so I figure the encoding mistake must be somewhere between database and PHP server.

What factors that I've overlooked could be messing up the encoding here, or what could I try to figure out where exactly the problem lies?

Answer 1

PHPMyAdmin tells you only about its own connection charset and not about connection between database and your application. Try to run query

SET NAMES utf8

right after you made a connection