how to get rid of diamond symbols on latest php version?

I am moving the website to vps hosting with latest php. I'm now seeing symbols (diamonds) for apostrophes and reg symbol. I do have that (, false) statement you told me to put. and htmlentities, stripchar etc. but I still get them. I've tried UTF-8 Charset and back to 8859-1. Any suggestions would be appreciated. See link below. Thanks.

This is usually because of a mismatch between the charset of the database column and the page. They need to match and usually UTF-8 is the best option to accommodate all characters. If the mismatch happened when the data was inserted or updated it might be wrong in the database column itself and have to be corrected before it will display properly on the page.

The old server handling it ok (using php 5.3). The new server using php 7.3 and newer version of mysql displays diamonds. I change cx to db to old server from new hosting and I still get the diamonds no matter if I specify meta utf-8 or iso-8859-1. The old page (#1 see below) doesn't even match as the html page is set to meta iso-8559 but the db is utf8_general_ci (including the fields).

the code on the page is:

<?php echo ((substr((html_entity_decode($WADAnews->getColumnVal("news_content", false))), 0, 200))) . "......"; ?> READ FULL STORY <img src="images/arrow.png" width="10px" height="auto" alt=""/>

Thanks for your help.

I'll need FTP access to the site with the issue in order to debug why it isn't working. Did you set the charset in the Connection file? It should be set there as well.

I would verify the charset is set to utf-8 in all three locations:

1) set in the database column
2) set in the connection
3) set on the page

It looks like placing the code in the connection file finally did it for me.

mysqli_set_charset($conn,"utf8");

Thanks much for the direction!

There's a specific folder with some pages in which I cannot successfully change the diamonds to the correct symbols. It's the same website, and the connection file has the same code as above. The DB is set to utf-general-ci, so are all the columns and so is the php file with the meta tag set to <meta charset="UTF-8">. I do a view source and it's correct, but the diamonds keeps displaying, until I change my browser to view as Western. What could I be missing? The page has a login so I can't send you the link for you to view. Is there a php option to force it? I saw something about ICONV but not sure how to implement yet.

You could try:

<?php

ini_set( 'default_charset', 'UTF-8' );

?>

Thanks. I have that in there. No go. Maybe you'll spot it immediately. I have dbs and all set correctly from what I see. Can I call you later? Is this something you could provide some tech support on a support ticket?

Yes. Call me and we can screen share to figure it out.