Issue with Characters not saving to database

Sometimes we get international orders and they use characters that have accent marks in the personalization of the item. It gets saved to the database as something like:

Merci pour votre présence, vos sourires, vos délicates attentions.
Nous y avons été très sensibles .
Grâce a vous cette journée restera à jamais gravée dans nos coeurs.


Does anyone know how I can get this to save to the database as the characters that were intended to be used?

Thanks
Sam

this has to do with the collation being used for the table in the database

You should edit the database and make sure the tables collation os set to UTF8


you may also want to set the connection to utf8.

In the connection file after the last line add:

mysql_set_charset('utf8',$<yourConnectionName>);

where <yourConnectionName> is the name of your connection

Hi Jason

Thanks for responding. Your response got me going in the right direction.
I resolved this.
Im updating this for anyone in the future with this issue.

I had all the collation right.
what ended up being the problem was so easy - but completely missed.
dreamweaver by default had used this in every page:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html"; charset="iso-8859-1">
and i just changed that to
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html"; charset="utf-8">

AND
digging deeper, on any update/edit pages, every "binding" of fields to form elements had this same character set tagged. So i had to change that too.

as soon as i changed this it was fixed.

sam

excellent, glad to hear it is working.