title: How do I ensure that user entered data containing international characters doesn't get corrupted?
body: <p>It often happens that characters such as <em>é</em> gets transformed to <em>Ã©</em>, even though the collation for the MySQL DB, table and field is set to utf8_general_ci. The encoding in the <em>Content-Type</em> for the page is also set to UTF8.</p>
  <p>I know about utf8_encode/decode, but I'm not quite sure about where and how to use it.</p>
  <p>I have read the &quot;<a href="http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!)</a>&quot; article, but I need some MySQL / PHP specific pointers.</p>
  <p>How do I ensure that user entered data containing international characters doesn't get corrupted?</p>