implementing PHP's PDO Prepared Statements and Non-UTF8 Data from MySQL
I'm working on a project and hit a roadblock. Quick question that's been bugging me - I've looked through the documentation and I'm still confused about I'm having trouble when using PDO prepared statements in PHP to fetch data from a MySQL database that contains non-UTF8 encoded characters... I'm working with PHP 8.1 and MySQL 5.7, and I have set the character set to UTF8 in my PDO connection, but some data is still being returned as corrupted characters or question marks. I created my PDO object like this: ```php try { $dsn = 'mysql:host=localhost;dbname=testdb;charset=utf8'; $options = [ PDO::ATTR_ERRMODE => PDO::ERRMODE_EXCEPTION, PDO::ATTR_DEFAULT_FETCH_MODE => PDO::FETCH_ASSOC, PDO::ATTR_EMULATE_PREPARES => false, ]; $pdo = new PDO($dsn, 'username', 'password', $options); } catch (PDOException $e) { echo 'Connection failed: ' . $e->getMessage(); } ``` Then, I execute a query to fetch data: ```php $stmt = $pdo->prepare('SELECT name FROM users WHERE id = :id'); $stmt->execute(['id' => $userId]); $result = $stmt->fetch(); ``` The question arises when I try to output `$result['name']`, which sometimes displays as `??????` for certain records. I checked the database and the character set for the `users` table is set to `latin1`. I realize that this inconsistency could be because the data was originally inserted with a different character set. I've tried using `SET NAMES 'utf8'` before executing the query, but it didn't change the output. Additionally, I attempted to convert the retrieved string using `mb_convert_encoding()`, but that didn't yield the expected results either. How can I ensure that the data fetched from MySQL using PDO displays correctly when dealing with legacy non-UTF8 encoded data? Is there a proper way to convert or handle these character sets dynamically? This is part of a larger service I'm building. My development environment is Linux. Any ideas what could be causing this? My development environment is Linux. What's the best practice here?