When I add a record into mysql, I type the foreign characters straight into the textarea then submit. This then gets saved into a mysql database (field type is set to 'utf8_general_ci'. This saves the text in the foreign characters.
When viewing the text it comes out a bit awkward (see [login to view URL]). Some characters do not show. BUT when viewing in a textarea or in PHPMyAdmin it looks perfect.
To view, the font is set to: font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif; and in the html I am using:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "[login to view URL]">
<html xmlns="[login to view URL]">
...
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
This is probably such an easy thing to do, I just can not think what it could be!