How can I store the '€' symbol in MySQL using PHP?

I've set the PHP character set to utf-8:

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

I've set the currency column in MySQL to varchar(1) with collation utf8_unicode_ci.

However, the following code in PHP:

$currency = '€';
$sql = "UPDATE myTable SET currency = '$currency' WHERE user = '$user'";
mysql_query($sql);

Produces the following character in MySQL:

â

How can I get the € symbol to store properly in MySQL?

Answer

Make sure your script file, the file that contains the line

$currency = '€';

is encoded UTF-8. You should have an option to that effect in your editor's or IDE's "Save as" dialog.

Then make sure your connection is UTF-8 encoded as well - it is ISO-8859-1 by default.

After connecting to the database, for mySQL before 5.0.7:

mysql_query("SET NAMES utf8");

For mySQL 5.0.7 and newer:

mysql_set_charset("utf8");