Until then we have to make do and mend.

First setup your database to work with UTF8. I won’t waste time telling you how to do this in MySQL as many people far brighter than I have written more on the subject.

CodeIgniter comes with UTF8 enabled out of the box so there is little to do configuration wise. Unfortunately pasting a test string such as: 検索 (which I stole from this Wikipedia page) into a CI input box will quickly lead to calamity as CI tries to save the string as ASCII.

Simple solution then, save the following helper in your system/application/helpers folder:

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<?php if ( ! defined('BASEPATH')) exit('No direct script access allowed');
/**
* Rewrite all outgoing text into UTF8 compatible streams
* Author: Matt Carter <m@ttcarter.com>
* Info: http://hash-bang.net/2009/02/utf8-with-codeigniter
*/
function ob_utf8($string) {
	return utf8_decode($string);
}
ob_start('ob_utf8');
 
foreach ($_POST as $key => $val) // Re-write all incoming text into UTF8 streams
	$_POST[$key] = utf8_encode($val);
?>

Then simply add it to your system/application/autoload.php:

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$autoload['helper'] = array('utf8');

The helper will automatically convert incoming POST data into MySQL compatible UTF8 and convert outgoing text into HTML UTF8 streams.