This was really bothering me and I searched the internet for a solution but didn’t find much information so I thought I’d write up a quick solution that worked for me. My issue was in the MySQL database itself. All I had to do was log into PHP My Admin with the same user name and password I used to create the database and navigate to the operations tab and under the Collation drop down menu choose “utf8_bin” and press GO.
Easy as pie!
SimpleTechGuy