Question: this problem is driving me nuts. I have a test server and a live server. The test server is showing unicode characters retrieved from an Azure sql database correctly. While the live server running identical code accessing the same data is not showing them correctly.

The data in the database is:
Hallo ich heiße Pokémon! Ich würde gerne mal mit einem anderen Kämpfe! 

The test servers shows 
 Hallo ich heiße Pokémon! Ich würde etc...

The live server, which is an Azure web service shows 
 Hallo ich hei�e Pok�mon! Ich w�rde gerne mal mit einem anderen K�mpfe

Same PHP code, Same database, Same browser, same db connection string,
different web servers, different results.

I do know Azure is running PHP 5.6 and the test server is running PHP 5.3
They are using sqlsrv\_connect
The data field is type varchar.

I tried using "CharacterSet" => "UTF-8" in the connection but this made no difference to the Azure server and screwed up the result on the test server.

I am out of ideas and leads.

Answer: 
Edit: After searching stackoverflow, here is a solution you maybe looking for: [MySQL - How to search for exact word match using LIKE?](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5743177/mysql-how-to-search-for-exact-word-match-using-like)

What‘s you‘r searchquery exactly?

```
SELECT * FROM songs WHERE singers RLIKE '^Gallagher';

```
If you want search single name based on last name (surname) then you need to write below query

```
SELECT * FROM songs WHERE singers LIKE '%Gallagher';

```