UTF-8 string wrongly encoded somewhere

I have a column, title, which is of the format CHAR(50) utf_genral_ci. I have a php script that successfully inserts a new row with the title value "Bjørn".

The problem occurs when I want to pull it out again. Once it is assigned to a variable the string is开发者_如何转开发 "Bjørn".

Some have pointed me towards mb_*(), however since it's not a problem when I am retrieving it from a form and inserting it, but only when I retrieve it from mysql, I dont believe that can be it.

I have made sure that it is in fact encoded correctly in mysql, and server, database, table, column and connection are ALL UTF-8.

Please someone save me from this nightmare!

Thanks in advance

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It turned out to be because I used the php function htmlentities() on my string. Very weird since last I tried, it also output wrong straight from the database.

I have been having problems with this all day, so the solution to one problem has caused another.

Thanks for taking your time.

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Did you check the value in database using an admin tool like phpMyAdmin or MySQL Workbench? If it is not displayed correctly, try converting the name to utf-8 using iconv ($in_charset, 'utf-8', $str). If it is correct, make sure that the encoding in your browser is set to UTF-8.