Presented on October 28th 2013 at the International PHP Conference, Munich, Germany.
For any application with even the remotest ambition of international use, the only way to go is to use UTF-8. And even without that ambition, using UTF-8 might still bring you more benefits than you currently realize. Unfortunately most developers at one point or another run into problems implementing UTF-8 and get discouraged. That ends now! In this talk I will cover UTF-8 from the basic linguistics, through client-side aspects to all the steps you need to take to tackle the most common (and some more obscure) issues when using UTF-8 in a database driven web application.