How to properly handle international character in PHP / MySQL / Apache

Question

I need to create an application in PHP that can handle all Unicode characters in all places — edit fields, static HTML, database. Can somebody tell me the complete list of a

Answer 1

I used the mentioned methods and they worked fine. Until recently, when my provider has updated PHP to 5.2.11 and MySQL to 5.0.81-community. After this change the unicode characters were properly retrieved from the database, but all updates were corrupted and unicode characters were being replaced by '?'.

The solution was to use:

mysql_set_charset('utf8',$conn);

It was required even though we used:

SET NAMES utf8
SET CHARACTER SET utf8

Also - since we have used ADOdb then we needed to find the PHP connection handle. We used the following statement:

mysql_set_charset('utf8',$adoConn->_connectionID);