Spanish Characters not Displaying Correctly

Things to consider in PHP/MySQL/UTF-8

• The database tables and text columns should be set to UTF-8

• HTML page Content-Type should be set to UTF-8

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

• PHP should send a header informing the browser to expect UTF-8

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

• The PHP-MySQL connection should be set to UTF-8

  mysqli_query("SET CHARACTER_SET_CLIENT='utf8'",$conn);

  mysqli_query("SET CHARACTER_SET_RESULTS='utf8'",$conn);

  mysqli_query("SET CHARACTER_SET_CONNECTION='utf8'",$conn);

• PHP ini has default_charset setting it should be utf-8 if you do not have access to it use ini_set('default_charset', 'utf-8');

I have suffered this problem for many years and I can't find any logic and I have tried all the solutions above.

One solution is to make html codes for all text. Here is a function I have used when all else has failed.

function span_accent($wordz)
{

$wordz = str_replace( "Á","Á",$wordz);
$wordz = str_replace( "É","É",$wordz);
$wordz = str_replace( "Í","Í",$wordz);
$wordz = str_replace( "Ó","Ó",$wordz);
$wordz = str_replace( "Ú","Ú",$wordz);
$wordz = str_replace( "Ñ","Ñ",$wordz);
$wordz = str_replace( "Ü","Ü",$wordz);

$wordz = str_replace( "á","á",$wordz);
$wordz = str_replace( "é","é",$wordz);
$wordz = str_replace( "í","í",$wordz);
$wordz = str_replace( "ó","ó",$wordz);
$wordz = str_replace( "ú","ú",$wordz);
$wordz = str_replace( "ñ","ñ",$wordz);
$wordz = str_replace( "ü","ü",$wordz);

$wordz = str_replace( "¿","¿",$wordz);
$wordz = str_replace( "¡","¡",$wordz);
$wordz = str_replace( "€","€",$wordz);
$wordz = str_replace( "«","«",$wordz);
$wordz = str_replace( "»","»",$wordz);
$wordz = str_replace( "‹","‹",$wordz);
$wordz = str_replace( "›","›",$wordz);
return $wordz;
}