Spanish Characters not Displaying Correctly

I am getting the lovely � box where spanish characters should be displayed. (ie: ñ, á, etc). I have already made sure that my meta http-equiv is set to utf-8:

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

I have also made sure that the page header is set for utf-8 also:

header('Content-type: text/html; charset=UTF-8');

Here is the beginning stages of my code thus far:

<?php
    setlocale(LC_ALL, 'es_MX');
    $datetime = strtotime($event['datetime']);
    $date = date("M j, Y", $datetime);
    $day = strftime("%A", $datetime);
    $time = date("g:i", $datetime);
?>
    <a href="/<?= $event['request'] ?>.html"><?= $day ?> <?= $time ?></a> 

The above code is in a where statement. I have read that switching the collation in the database can also be a factor but I already have it set to UTF-8 General ci. Plus, the only thing that is in that column is DateTime anyway which is numbers and cannot be collated anyway.

result: s�bado 8:00

Any help is greatly appreciated as always.

Answer

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');