If you need to store non-UTF8 data, MongoDB has a binary data type: http://php.net/manual/en/class.mongobindata.php http://php.net/manual/en/class.mongobindata

If you need to store non-UTF8 data, MongoDB has a binary data type: http://php.net/manual/en/class.mongobindata.php http://php.net/manual/en/class.mongobindata.php You can't do things like regex searches on binary data, but since MongoDB supports different data types within the same "column", you can just store some as UTF8 and some as binary, depending on whether the string has non-UTF8 characters in it.