Why is this the extended ascii character (â, é, etc) getting replaced with <?> characters?

Question

Why is this the extended ascii character (â, é, etc) getting replaced with characters?

I attached a pic... but I am using PHP to pull the data from MySQL,

Answer 1

I changed all my tables over to UTF-8 and reinserted all the data (waste of time) as it never helped. It was latin1 prior.

If your original data was latin1, then inserting it into a UTF-8 database won't convert it to UTF-8, AFAIK, it will insert the same data but now believe it's UTF-8, thus breaking.

If you've got a SQL dump, I'd suggest running it through a tool to convert to UTF-8. Notepad++ does this pretty well - simply open the file, check that the accented characters are displaying correctly, then find "convert to UTF-8" in the menu.