I’m encountering an issue with displaying emojis on my website after hosting it, and I could really use some assistance.
Here’s the problem: I have a database containing content with emojis. While everything displays correctly on my local server (I’m using WAMP server), after hosting the website, the emojis appear as question marks (“?”) instead of the actual emojis.
I’ve checked the character encoding settings for both the database and the web pages, and they are configured to use UTF-8 encoding. Additionally, the database collation is set to utf8mb4_unicode_ci to support emojis.
Despite these configurations, the emojis still aren’t displaying correctly on the hosted website.
If anyone has encountered a similar issue or has any insights into what might be causing this problem, I would greatly appreciate your assistance. Any suggestions or advice would be incredibly helpful in resolving this issue.
Just to be sure: are you also setting the MySQL connection charset?
phpMyAdmin uses UTF-8 by default, the tables use whatever you configure them to use, but PHP by default uses a different encoding (latin1 if I remember correctly). So if you don’t configure the charset in PHP, then special characters created from your website don’t work in phpMyAdmin, and vice versa.
To fix this, you should always set the connection charset in your PHP code too to match what’s in your database:
And if you think “that’s dumb, why would you have defaults like this”, then I agree, but the unfortunate reality is that we can’t fix this without breaking every website that doesn’t have this set already.