Becouse I’ve received a lot of emails asking me how can AS3FlexDB can select UTF8 data from MySQL i have decided to write a post and explain how you can load UTF8 data from MySQL in Flex.

There are three steps you must done to accomplish this:

Step 1

Setup your MySQL table fields to support UTF8. You can do this by changing your collation to utf8_general_ci 

Step 2

Edit the AS3FlexDB service ( database.php ) on function open($strUser, $strPass, $strHost) line 37  after 

$rsConnectionID = @mysql_connect($strHost, $strUser, $strPass);

 add 

mysql_set_charset(’utf8′, $rsConnectionID);

this function will set UTF8  character set for the current connection.

Step 3

Edit AMFPHP gateway.php file. The gateway.php file is the bridge between your flash .swf file and AS3FlexDB service (database.php). In this file all you need to change is the setCharsetHandler method.

Replace :

$gateway->setCharsetHandler(”utf8_decode”, “ISO-8859-1″, “ISO-8859-1″);

with :

$gateway->setCharsetHandler( “none”, “ISO-8859-1″, “ISO-8859-1″ );

and this is all. If you have done everything right you can now load UTF8 data from MySQL. 
If you want to read more about  character set in AMFPHP you can check this tutorial.