How to insert Spanish characters in MySQL?

Question

I am trying to do a simple insert with Spanish characters without success. This is my simple MySQL table structure:

CREATE TABLE student (
  id INTEGER NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
  name VARCHAR(100) NOT NULL,
  lastname VARCHAR(100) NOT NULL,
  CONSTRAINT PK_STUDENT PRIMARY KEY (id)
) CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci;

The name and lastname fields will be from Spanish people, their first and last names are like this:

• Daniel Velásquez

• Javier Ñañez

• Víctor Sánchez

But when I do the following:

mysql> INSERT INTO student (name, lastname) VALUES ('Víctor', 'Sanchez');

I get this error:

ERROR 1366 (HY000): Incorrect string value: '\xA1ctor' for column 'name' at row
1

Well, I am really confused about collations, encondings and everything related when doing a search on internet.

So, what is the correct way to deal with this? Just to know I am using PHP and I know that a way to retrieve some special characters is using htmlentities($value);

Thanks in advance.

Solution

please take a look at this

it will help you

Handling Unicode Front To Back In A Web App

this is about the encoding character encoding