Try to send a query
SET NAMES utf8;
Personally I solved the same problem by adding after the MySQL connection code :
mysql_set_charset("utf8");
or:
mysqli_set_charset("utf8");
or the equivalent in OOP :
$mysqli_link->set_charset("utf8");
And sometimes you will have to set the php main charset by adding this code:
mb_internal_encoding('UTF-8');
On the HTML client side you have to add the following header data:
<meta http-equiv="Content-type" content="text/html;charset=utf-8" />
To use JSON AJAX results (for example, using jQuery), you must define the header by adding:
header("Content-type: application/json;charset=utf8");
json_encode(
some_data
);
This should resolve