The query SELECT * FROM tbl1 where text like "%word%" when I run it via php does not return an entry whose text="word".
When you run the query through phpmyadmin - word comes back
The query SELECT * FROM tbl1 where text like "%ord%" works correctly?
What could it be? I suspect that something with encodings, but the query SHOW VARIABLES LIKE 'char%' in both cases returns the same values:
character_set_client=utf8mb4
character_set_connection=utf8mb4
character_set_database=latin1
character_set_filesystem=binary
character_set_results=utf8mb4
character_set_server=latin1
character_set_system=utf8
character_sets_dir=/usr/share/mysql/charsets/