In order for website to accept user submitted content which may not be in English (e.g. Japanese) and save it to the database, is it in my best interest to utf8_encode all new content, and user utf8_decode when retrieving it later?
Further info: I am using doctrine and I am getting an errors when attempting to save or select Unicode characters to the MySQL database:
SQLSTATE[HY000]: General error: 1267 Illegal mix of collations (latin1_swedish_ci,IMPLICIT) and (utf8_general_ci,COERCIBLE) for operation '='