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Okay here goes (again)... If you can't tell the theme of some of my posts lately they are all about utf8 support and why does my data start getting littered with garbage characters? I've been working for over three weeks on trying to understand the process of character sets, collation and character collation connection cradle to grave. I see that a clean install of Prestashop uses: InnoDB tables UTF-8 charset utf8_general_ci collation After installing modules (some free some paid it happens on both) I see some of the following: MyISAM tables latin1 charset (at the table and column level) latin1_swedish_ci collation utf8_unicode_ci collation It's then that I start seeing garbage and it just gets worse the more that I try to fix it: <a href="http://capvapor.com/8-efest" title="Shenzhen Fest Technology Co, LTD was first established in 2009 with our main focus on chargers and Li-ion rechargeable batteries including LiMn ( IMR), Nickel Metal Hydride (Ni-MH) and LiFePO4 batteries currently in use for many different applications today including Flashlights, E-cigs &amp; Vaping Mods, Power Tools, Solar lighting, emergency lighting, cordless phone, etc... Quality is of utmost importance in the continued development and growth 8of Efest Brand of Shenzhen Fest Technology . Efest batteries are approved by CE and Comply with RoHS and our factories hold certification in compliance with ISO9001/2000. Over 90% of our products are exported overseas globally each year .">eFest</a> So after all this time I don't think there is anywhere else that I can change the settings in PHP/MySQL/Apache to "force" UTF-8 charset, connection encoding or collation. I see that inside some modules the PHP is creating the tables there is engine=MyISAM and charset=latin1: function installDB() { $query = 'CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `'._DB_PREFIX_.'AAAAAAA_lang` ( `id_AAAAAAA` int(11) DEFAULT NULL, `id_lang` int(11) DEFAULT NULL, `age` varchar(255) DEFAULT NULL, `url` text, `title` text, `reason` text, `mentions` text, '.( (version_compare(Configuration::get('PS_INSTALL_VERSION'), '1.5.0') >= 0) ? "" : "`dateformat` text,`remember` text,").' `trust` text ) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1'; Db::getInstance()->Execute($query); $query = 'CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `'._DB_PREFIX_.'AAAAAAA` ( `id_AAAAAA` int(11) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT, '.( (version_compare(Configuration::get('PS_INSTALL_VERSION'), '1.5.0') >= 0) ? "`dateformat` text,`remember` text," : "").' PRIMARY KEY (`id_AAAA`) ) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1 AUTO_INCREMENT=8 ; '; Db::getInstance()->Execute($query); So I want to know if these are the root cause of the garbage and what if any issues it would cause if I modified this to create the table using utf8 and even InnoDB? I just don't understand why these people don't use the environment variables to create these tables? I see that they are using other globals and if this is setting the connection collation to something other than utf8 then this could be the root cause of my issues. I am using 1.5.6.2 and I am pulling my hair out so if anyone could help me get this figured out I would greatly appreciate it! If you need anything else from me please let me know. Thank you, James Stepp