title: Global languages in MySQL with PHP
body: <p>We started website in intention that we only use English language and do all insertion/deletion to MySQL using English. And use PHP to escape string while writing to database.</p>
  
  <p>Now the situation is our website have lot of Chinese/German/Russian users, and we are facing problem writing data into MySQL - PHP is able to write data to the database but it does some internal conversions like it replace a few characters to something different (eg. Plötzlich --> Plq$tzlich).</p>
  
  <p>But if I go to phpMyAdmin and copy paste Chinese or any other language string and do insert it write exactly as it is. So suspecting is that PHP doing conversion before writing to the database.</p>
  
  <p>We are in process to make it work for all language, but this is first time we are dealing with global languages in (MySQL and PHP).</p>
  
  <p>If any expert could share some info that would be great and highly appreciated.</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li>We have MYSQL InnoDB database with data in it, how shall we do conversion to support global languages?</li>
  <li>We use PHP to write records to MySQL and use escape string (data) and then write it to database. We think that escape does not support global languages it does some conversion. How to handle this or what else we should use?</li>
  <li>Does this conversion impact existing data in database?</li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>We would be really thankful if we get some expert help on this.</p>