Mysql Charset set in header, results differ on pages

I am building a My开发者_开发技巧sql database, holding details of owners and breeders of ponies, as well as details on the animals themselves. The information is updated and viewed via PHP. As part of this, I have pages where contacts are listed out, and other pages where contacts may be assigned (via dropdown) to an animal as either an owner or a breeder. The database connection is set in the header (called by function) and closed at the end of each query.

I noticed that some characters (e.g. É) were not being rendered properly (�) in the dropdown lists of contacts, but were fine in the list pages. Having looked into previous questons posed here (Special characters in PHP / MySQL) I set my table's collation to utf8_bin, and connect to the db via

<?php
$con = mysql_connect("localhost", "user", "pass");
mysql_select_db("db", $con);
mysql_set_charset('utf8',$con);
?>

This resolved the dropdown list issue perfectly - but the list pages are now causing trouble. (É is now É). My browser was set to Western ISO-8859-1, but even changing that to UTF-8 has not helped. Echoing out

$charset = mysql_client_encoding($con);
echo "The current character set is: $charset\n";

at the foot of the list returns uft8, as it should. My bam is boozled.

Any advice greatly appreciated!

(P.s. in anticipation: the language will be overwhelmingly English, but with some Irish Gaelic, and possibly some French & German too. I have also tried all of the above with the Latin1 encoding.)

EDIT:

To fix the problem:

• set the charset for the connection ($con)
• set the collation for the data in the table - by column, by table is not sufficient
• made sure to declare the HTML charset in my header via meta tag.

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I suspect that you list display code utf8-encodes the HTML somehow. Remove that utf8_encode calls there.

You might also be missing the encoding declaration in the HTML pages themselves, which is needed to tell the browser that the page has the specific charset.