I have the following very simple code, which retrieves utf8 formatetd data, such as containing umlauts from a mysql database, which may or may not be set as utf8. If I use e
Perhaps the error lies in the charset you're serving the page with. If you're getting UTF-8 content out of the database and serving it with the default HTML charset of Windows-1252 then it's going to look garbled. Make sure you have the equivalent of this:
header( 'Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8' );
in your PHP code.
If you still have problems, please provide more data, especially what is expected and what finally delivered