You might be surprised, but a right choise of the project text encoding can affect the project file size and amount of bugs.
To avoid bugs of wrong presentation of text on your page, make sure that all database entities and the application server (PHP) use the same encoding. That helps to forget about issues connected with text presentation.
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On database side, make sure you set the correct encoding to:
- database,
- tables,
- columns,
- import-export tools parameters (a big source of wrong encoding bugs),
- corresponding SQL server variables
On application server it’s usually just one query –
SET NAMES utf8Pay attention, that utf8 might be not the best choise for your project: every non-English character needs 2-6 bytes of memory, so if you built a one-language (local) project with lots of database data, consider using a 1 byte encoding like windows-1251 and save about half of the space on server file system.
