Displaying Some Sort Of Apostrophe (Currently Shows As Diamond)

Some rows in my database contain an apostrophe of sorts, that, when displayed with PHP, are converted to diamonds with a question mark in the center. Example, if it copies correctl

Solution 1:

Characters are encoded in different places.

MySQL has a particular character encoding. By default, it is not UTF-8 but rather latin1.

The HTML document you generate using PHP also has a particular character encoding specified. Finally, the actual bytes in the HTML document factually assume a particular character encoding, which if you're not careful can be different than the character encoding you specify for the document.

Verify that your MySQL encoding is set to UTF-8 as a first step. Note that MySQL can have the default character encoding for the database overridden on a per-table or even per-column basis.

You may be interested in this related post to get a deeper understanding of character encoding

Character Encoding and the ’ Issue

Update

Something put the data into the MySQL database in the first place. Perhaps that "something" was not using UTF-8 encoding.