Problems displaying French accented characters in UTF-8

Question

I\'m working on a French language site built in CakePHP. I have tried multiple functions to try and convert the text into UTF-8 and display properly, but have had no succes

Answer 1

In case this helps anyone using PHP Classes.

My solution was to set Character Encoding to my Connection.

//connect to MySQL and select DB
public function open_connection() {
    $this->connection = new mysqli( DB_SERVER, DB_USER, DB_PASS, DB_NAME );
    if ( !$this->connection ) {
        die( "Database connection failed: " . mysqli_error() );
    }
    mysqli_set_charset($this->connection,"utf8");
}