Encoding problems while displaying formatted text with php

I have formatted english text stored in mysql. When I echo it out with php, I get a whole a lot of "�开发者_JAVA百科 � � � � ���" instead of where spaces should be. It looks fine in the DB.

Whats the reason for that?

---

I have come across this problem before and what I have done is set the db and column collation to utf8_general_ci. And between my tags put the below meta line in.

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />

Then I ran this query when I open my db connection: mysql_query("SET NAMES 'utf8'");

This helped me with multilingual websites quite a bit :-)

---

That will most likely have to do with either your database has a conflicting character set to that of your html document, or your server is pushing out the wrong character encoding for your html document.

---

if your characters looks OK in your DB: Try setting this php/html output-encode to the same encode you have in your DB...

What characters are? speaking language?...