Accented characters in mySQL table

Question

I have some texts in French (containing accented characters such as \"é\"), stored in a MySQL table whose collation is utf8_unicode_ci (both the table and the columns), that

Answer 1

This works for me

1. Make your database utf8_general_ci
2. Save your files in N++ as UTF-8 without BOM
3. Put $mysqli->query('SET NAMES utf8'); after the connection to the database in your PHP file
4. Put < meta charset="utf-8" /> in your HTML-s

Works perfect.