I have an odd problem. I'm running MySQL 5.1 on Windows (but production server is Debian Linux and same issue occurs).
I'm using mysql_query() to UPDATE a table. The description field can occasionally have special characters like degree symbol, plus/minus, etc.
I have looked at the query before being sent to mysql_query() and it looks fine. I run the exact query through mysql client and it works fine. but passing the query to mysql_query() causes of of the special characters to be prefixed with an accented A:
BAKE AT 365 - 383 °F FOR 3 HOURS.
Not sure what the heck is going on here, any ideas? I've googled and tried setting everything to UTF-8 and more - whatever I could find.
I'm out of options, converting to html entities is not a option because this text is converted to PDF and various output in other technologies like Access 97 that don't render the entity properly - so the print out has °
which confuses the guys reading the documents.
Suggestions?