Re: Using accentuation or other special characters and printing with php.

[Rick James]

If your encoding is utf8, then use utf8_*. Using latin* would confuse it.

As I understand it, "a", with or without accents, collates the same? Probably utf8_general_ci would do just as well as utf8_unicode_ci. Since the Portuguese rules seem 'simple' both probably do the collation correctly.

utf8_unicode_ci is slower because it attempts to handle multi-character oddities, such as Spanish ll and ch, plus variant ways of applying accents to characters (grave-a versus non-spacing-grave, then 'a').

utf8 is the "right" way to go, but if you can truly strict your input to Portuguese, one of the latin* charsets and collations may be ok.