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.