Which SQL collation to use for special characters such as é? [duplicate]

Question

How do I make special characters appear in my PHP page, knowing that I call the content using an SQL query. For example é appears as � and so on for all other special characters.

I'm using a MySQL server. The db collation was set to utf8_unicode_ci, however some attributs of the tables were set to latin1_swedish_ci

Answer 1

ALTER DATABASE databasename CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci;

This should work for entire DB. Source

Answer 2

Use the UTF-8 character set when you create a database or table:

CREATE DATABASE Soccer CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci;

You can find further information here.