UTF-8 encoded html pages show � (questions marks) instead of characters

Question

I have the standard XAMPP installation on win7 (x64). Having had my share of encoding troubles in a past project where mysql encoding did not match with the php enconding wh

Answer 1

When [dropping] the encoding settings mentioned above all characters [are rendered] correctly but the encoding that is detected shows either windows-1252 or ISO-8859-1 depending on the browser.

Then that's what you're really sending. None of the encoding settings in your bullet list will actually modify your output in any way; all they do is tell the browser what encoding to assume when interpreting what you send. That's why you're getting those �s - you're telling the browser that what you're sending is UTF-8, but it's really ISO-8859-1.