title: Manipulating utf8mb4 data from MySQL with PHP
body: <p>This is probably something simple. I swear I've been looking online for the answer and haven't found it. Since my particular case is a little atypical I finally decided to ask here.</p>
  
  <p>I have a few tables in MySQL that I'm using for a Chinese language program. It needs to be able to support every possible Chinese character, including rare ones that don't have great font support. A sample cell in the table might be this:</p>
  
  <blockquote>
    <p>東菄鶇䍶倲涷蝀凍鯟崠埬䰤</p>
  </blockquote>
  
  <p>In order to get that to work right in the database, I've had to set the encoding/collation to utf8mb4. So far so good. Unfortunately when I pull the same string into PHP, it gets printed as this:</p>
  
  <blockquote>
    <p>東菄鶇䍶?倲??涷蝀凍鯟?崠埬?䰤</p>
  </blockquote>
  
  <p>How can I finally kill off the remaining question marks and get them to show as the unicode glyphs they should be? I've got the php page itself using UTF8 encoding in the  tag and as a meta tag.</p>
  
  <p>Why can't they communicate with each other? What am I doing wrong?</p>