Convert project from windows-1256 to utf-8 charset, what are the right steps?

Question

I have a PHP and MySQL script that use Windows-1256 encoding, now I want to change the whole script so that it is completely built on utf-8 encoding. starting with mysql DataBase to PHP files.

What are the right steps to achieve this? !!

Note. I am using non-latin language in script (arabic language).

Answer 1

At the database level, look:

• Converting MySQL data in latin1 to utf8 utf-8
• PHP UTF-8 cheatsheet

As for your html pages, use this meta tag:

 <meta charset=utf-8 /> 

And you can also use this header from php:

 header('content-type: text/html charset=utf-8'); 

Or you can see the complete php-arabic solution here:

• http://www.ar-php.com/

Answer 2

I found a solution like this:

PHP and MySQL: smoothly creating a website on the local computer