21 Apr Character encoding - the bane of my existence

During the soft launch of [Free Pee 2](https://www.iqwerty.net/freepee2/m), I ran into a weird problem. Bathrooms that had Chinese descriptions wouldn't show up. Immediately, I thought of character encodings and database collation - but it didn't feel right because everything worked correctly in the original Free Pee app. Why did it suddenly stop working? After lots of Google searches and Stack Overflow answers, I added `$db->set_charset("utf8")` to my `mysqli` object. It turned out that didn't solve the problem either. Finally, after almost giving up hope, I decided to re-save all my app files as UTF-8 (even though they've never been anything _but_ UTF-8). To my surprise, that worked. I shrugged and moved on.