How to resolve mysql text encoding issue

I'm struggling with a mysql import issue and the usual remedies don't seem to be working. I'm trying to copy fields from one database to another (both Drupal systems).

Running "show table status on the databases" I notice that the origin table is utf8_bin and the destination table is utf8_general_ci.

I'm currently doing the import like this:

$olddb = mysql_connect("localhost", "user", "password");
mysql_select_db("origin", $olddb);
$result = mysql_query("set names utf8", $olddb);
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$newdb = mysql_connect("localhost", "user", "password");
mysql_select_db("destination", $newdb);
$result = mysql_query("set names utf8", $newdb);

$result = mysql_query("select first_name from origin_table", $olddb);
$row = mysql_fetch_array($result);

$query = "update destination_table set first_name = \"".$row["first_name"]."\"";
$result = mysql_query($query, $olddb);

The text looks like its importing correctly but when I try and edit the same fields in Drupal, I get the following weird question-mark characters between every character.

Fields in Safari browser

Fields in Firefox browser

Any ideas?

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How are you outputting the data from PHP->browser? You'd need to issue the appropriate headers to tell the browser to expect UTF-8 text, e.g:

header("Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8");

Given the "weird" characters, I'm guessing FF is seeing the text as something non-unicode, like iso8859-1 and assuming 1 byte/character.