Issue with utf-8 encoding using PHP + MySQL

Question

I moved data from MySQL 4 (they were originally set to latin2 encoding) to MySQL 5 and set encoding to utf-8. It

Answer 1

On my server, adding these to my php file had no effect:

ini_set('default_charset','utf-8');
mysql_set_charset('utf8');
header('Content-type: text/html; charset=utf-8');

But everything worked perfectly once I added this to the top of my php file:

$mysqli->query("SET NAMES 'utf8'");

Note: I am using encoding utf8_general_ci in my database, but utf8_unicode_ci works the same for me.

Hope that helps.