Tutorial by Examples

You should verify every received string as being valid UTF-8 before you try to store it or use it anywhere. PHP's mb_check_encoding() does the trick, but you have to use it consistently. There's really no way around this, as malicious clients can submit data in whatever encoding they want. $str...

If your application transmits text to other systems, they will also need to be informed of the character encoding. In PHP, you can use the default_charset option in php.ini, or manually issue the Content-Type MIME header yourself. This is the preferred method when targeting modern browsers. hea...

This topic specifically talks about UTF-8 and considerations for using it with a database. If you want more information about using databases in PHP then checkout this topic. Storing Data in a MySQL Database: Specify the utf8mb4 character set on all tables and text columns in your database. ...