The PHP Roundtable podcast, hosted by PHP community member Sammy K Powers, has posted their latest episode today: Episode #46 - Character Encoding and UTF-8 in PHP.

If you've ever gotten a number of weird looking characters in your database or on your website like, "?" and didn't know why, then this episode is for you. Those bizarre characters called "mojibake", rear their ugly heads when we don't account for a consistent character encoding. Today we discuss what character encoding is, how to accommodate for it in HTML, PHP & your database, and how we can ensure we'll never encounter an unexpected alien character in our web apps again.

For this episode Sammy is joined by Andreas Heigl and Evert Pot two developers more than familiar with Unicode woes. You can watch this latest episode through either the in-page audio or video player or by grabbing the audio file. If you enjoy the show, be sure to subscribe to their feed and follow them on Twitter for updates when future shows are released.