title: Laravel UTF-8 To Database
body: <p>I'm using Eloquent to save() a new person into my database. The persons name contains a special character <strong>é</strong> and it's not submitting. Here are my steps and the results.</p>
  <pre><code>echo Input::get('firstname'); // Miguél
  </code></pre>
  <p>Which gives me this</p>
  <h2>Miguél</h2>
  <p>When i start using eloquent the following happens.</p>
  <pre><code>$person = new Person();
  echo $person-&gt;firstname = Input::get('firstname'); 
  </code></pre>
  <p>This produces the following result</p>
  <h2>migu��l</h2>
  <p>Any idea what might be going wrong?
  These are my config settings in laravel</p>
  <p><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/84Lsm.jpg" alt="enter image description here" /></p>
  <p>And this is my database in phpmyadmin</p>
  <p><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/1Ohng.jpg" alt="enter image description here" /></p>
  <p>Thanks</p>