reading utf-8 content from mysql table

You are not defining your HTML page as UTF-8. See this question on ways to do that.

You may also need to set your database connection explicitly to UTF8. Doing a

mysql_query("SET NAMES utf8;");

^ Put it right under your database connection script or include and MAKE sure you have it placed before you do any necessary queries. Also, for collocation please take the time to make sure your setting it for your proper syntax type and general_ci seems working good for me when used. As a finale, clear your cache after banging your head, set your browser to proper encoding toolbar->view->encoding

Setting the connection to UTF8 after establishing the connection takes care of the problem. Don't do this if the first step already works.

UTF-8 content from MySQL table with PDO

To correctly get latin characters and so on from a MySQL table with PDO,

there is an hidden info coming from a "User Contributed Note" in the PHP manual website

(the crazy thing is that originally, that contribution was downvoted, now luckily turned to positive .. sometime some people need to got blamed)

my credits credits go to this article that pulled the solution and probably made that "User Contributed Note" to turn positive

If you want to have a clean database connection with correct Unicode characters

    $this->dbh = new PDO(
    "mysql:host=".DB_HOST.";dbname=".DB_NAME.";charset=utf8", 
    DB_USER, 
    DB_PASS);

Set the charset as utf8 as follows:

$conn = new mysqli($servername, $username, $password, $dbname);
$conn->set_charset("utf8");

Four good steps to always get correctly encoded UTF-8 text:

1) Run this query before any other query:

 mysql_query("set names 'utf8'");

2) Add this to your HTML head:

 <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=UTF-8">

3) Add this at top of your PHP code:

 header("Content-Type: text/html;charset=UTF-8");

4) Save your file with UTF-8 without BOM encoding using Notepad++ or any other good text-editor / IDE.