accents between php and mysql how to use?

Question

what is the correct way to create the database and tables in mysql 5.6 to meet Brazilian standards of characters?

my php version is 5.6 and I use the following information in the php file header

header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8');

and in html is like this

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

but every time I search for data in the database I need to use the functions

utf8_decode();
utf8_encode();

the database was created as follows Type:Innodb, Collation: utf8_general_ci, the way it was created is correct? or it is correct to use php’s utf8 functions to fix the accent problem?

Answer 1

Boy, I also used everything as utf-8 and still had problems with accentuation. The way I found to handle this is to run a query SET NAMES 'utf8' soon after connecting to the bank. I leave it directly in the connection file. It follows below:

//MySQLi DESENVOLVIMENTO
$db_host="localhost";
$db_port="5432";
$db_name="testedb";
$db_user="root";
$db_password="";

$dbcon = mysqli_connect( $db_host, $db_user, $db_password );
mysqli_select_db($dbcon,$db_name);
mysqli_query($dbcon,"SET NAMES 'utf8'");