php - Unicode character is shown as encoded ascii at client side -

i trying show emoji using unicode value(😀). getting escaped string \u00f0\u0178\u02dc\u20ac, decoded 😀.

i using mysql server , php 5.4 in project. in mysql, it's stored 😀. there way unescape , return actual unicode php server

i tried, iconv('ascii//translit', 'utf-8', '😀');, mb_convert_encoding($var, "us-ascii", "utf-8") , utf8_encode(). not working.

thanks

without knowing structure of database (make sure you're using utf8 character set table!), think problem may on display side. try starting php script sending header browser lets know you're going displaying utf8 characters, rather western encoding (iso-8859-1).

header('content-type text/html; charset=utf-8');