Fix Question Marks Instead of Accents in MySQL (3 Steps)

Quick answer for advanced users

Run SET NAMES utf8mb4 right after connecting to your MySQL database, then check your table's charset is also utf8mb4. That's the fix 90% of the time.

Why this happens

You enter José into a form, but MySQL stores it as Jos?. Or you're reading data from a CSV that has Müller but the database shows M?ller. This is a charset problem. Your database thinks in one language (like latin1), but your data is in another (UTF-8). When MySQL tries to convert characters it doesn't understand, it replaces them with question marks.

Three things need to speak the same character language: your database table, your database connection, and your data source. If any one of them is set to latin1 (or a different charset), you get question marks.

I've seen this happen most often when someone moves a site from a cheap shared host to a new server. The old host used latin1, the new one defaults to UTF-8, and suddenly all the Spanish accents break. Or when you import a CSV file that was saved as ANSI but your table expects UTF-8.

Step 1: Check your table's charset

Open phpMyAdmin or your MySQL client.

Run this SQL command:

SHOW TABLE STATUS LIKE 'your_table_name';

Look at the Collation column. If it says something like latin1_swedish_ci or utf8_general_ci, that's your problem.

After running the command, you'll see something like:

Name: users, Engine: InnoDB, Collation: latin1_swedish_ci

If it's not utf8mb4_unicode_ci or utf8mb4_general_ci, you need to change it.

Step 2: Alter the table and columns

Run these commands one at a time. They change the table's default charset and convert all text columns.
```
ALTER TABLE your_table_name CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET utf8mb4 COLLATE utf8mb4_unicode_ci;
```
Wait for it to finish. For a big table (like 100k rows), this might take 10-20 seconds.
After it finishes, you should see: Query OK, X rows affected.
Now check your data. Run:
```
SELECT * FROM your_table_name LIMIT 5;
```
If you still see question marks, the damage is already done — those question marks are now stored as question marks. You'll need to re-import the original data.

Step 3: Fix the connection

Even if your table is UTF-8, your application might connect using latin1. This is the most common reason I see this issue. The fix depends on your programming language.

For PHP (mysqli)

Right after you connect, add this line:

$conn->set_charset('utf8mb4');

For PHP (PDO)

Include this in your connection string:

$pdo = new PDO('mysql:host=localhost;dbname=test;charset=utf8mb4', 'user', 'pass');

For Python (mysql-connector)

Add charset parameter:

conn = mysql.connector.connect(charset='utf8mb4')

For Ruby on Rails

In config/database.yml, add:

encoding: utf8mb4

If the main fix doesn't work

Sometimes the data is already corrupted. The question marks are literally stored as question marks (character code 63). You can't undo that — you need to re-import the original data.

But here's what might still be wrong:

Your HTML page charset — Make sure your HTML has this meta tag:
```
<meta charset="UTF-8">
```
Your CSV file encoding — If you're importing data from a CSV, open it in Notepad++, go to Encoding menu, and make sure it says Encode in UTF-8-BOM. Save it, then re-import.
Your MySQL client — If you're running SQL commands from a terminal on Windows, the terminal itself might not support UTF-8. Use a proper client like MySQL Workbench or DBeaver instead.

How to prevent this

Do these three things on every new project:

Set your MySQL default charset to utf8mb4 at the server level. Edit my.cnf and add:
```
[mysqld]
character-set-server = utf8mb4
collation-server = utf8mb4_unicode_ci
```

When you create a new table, always specify charset:

CREATE TABLE users (
  id INT AUTO_INCREMENT PRIMARY KEY,
  name VARCHAR(100)
) CHARACTER SET utf8mb4 COLLATE utf8mb4_unicode_ci;

In your application code, set the connection charset immediately after connecting. Do it every time. Don't skip it.
If you're using PHP, also set the default charset in php.ini:
```
default_charset = "UTF-8"
```

Once you do these, you'll never see question marks again. I promise. I've fixed this issue on at least 30 different sites, and this is the only way that works long-term.