Wrong character encoding with database output using laravel

Question

I've recently started using laravel for a project I'm working on, and I'm currently having problems displaying data from my database in the correct character encoding.

My current system consists of a separate script responsible for populating the database with data, while the laravel project is reponsible for displaying the data. The view that is used, is set to display all text as utf-8, which works as I've successfully printed special characters in the view. Text from the database is not printed as utf8, and will not print special characters the right way. I've tried using both eloquent models and DB::select(), but they both show the same poor result.

charset in database.php is set to utf8 while collation is set to utf8_unicode_ci.

The database table:

CREATE TABLE `RssFeedItem` (
`id` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
`feedId` smallint(5) unsigned NOT NULL,
`title` varchar(250) COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci NOT NULL,
`url` varchar(250) COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci NOT NULL,
`created_at` datetime NOT NULL,
`updated_at` datetime NOT NULL,
`text` mediumtext COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci,
`textSha1` varchar(250) COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci DEFAULT NULL,
PRIMARY KEY (`id`),
UNIQUE KEY `url` (`url`),
KEY `feedId` (`feedId`),
CONSTRAINT `RssFeedItem_ibfk_1` FOREIGN KEY (`feedId`) REFERENCES `RssFeed` (`id`)
) ENGINE=InnoDB AUTO_INCREMENT=6370 DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8 COLLATE=utf8_unicode_ci;

I've also set up a test page in order to see if the problem could be my database setup, but the test page prints everything just fine. The test page uses PDO to select all data, and prints it on a simple html page.

Does anyone know what the problem might be? I've tried searching around with no luck besides this link, but I haven't found anything that might help me.

Answer 1

I did eventually end up solving this myself. The problem was caused by the separate script responsible for populating my database with data. This was solved by running a query with SET NAMES utf8 before inserting data to the database. The original data was pulled out, and then sent back in after running said query.

The reason for it working outside laravel, was simply because the said query wasn't executed on my test page. If i ran the query before retrieving the data, it came out with the wrong encoding because the query stated that the data was encoded as utf8, when it really wasn't.