I have a drupal form which saves user input into a MySQL database using the Doctrine library. The problem is that if the user input has accentuated characters, they don't look good in the DB. For example, `Sempé` becomes `SempÃ©`. This is strange to me because:

* the field it is getting stored into is utf8: `varchar(20) COLLATE utf8_swedish_ci NOT NULL,`
* the table is also utf8: `ENGINE=InnoDB AUTO_INCREMENT=202 DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8 COLLATE=utf8_swedish_ci`
* all my php scripts, including the one which tells drupal what fields to add into the form) are saved as utf-8
* the form drupal creates accepts utf8: `<form enctype="multipart/form-data" action="/drupal/identification" method="post" id="form-identification" accept-charset="UTF-8">`
* the page drupal creates is sent as utf8: `<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />`
* the php->mysql connection is set to utf8:

```
$dbParams = array("driver" => "pdo_mysql",
    "host" => variable_get("dbManip_host"),
    "user" => variable_get("dbManip_user"),
    "password" => variable_get("dbManip_password"),
    "dbname" => variable_get("dbManip_dbName"),
    "charset" => "utf8");

```

I also tried:

* adding `default_charset = "utf8"` to **php.ini**
* passing the form data in `utf8_encode` before saving it
* passing the form data in `mb_convert_encoding` before saving it

but none of those worked.

Am I missing anything here?

**UPDATE**

I had a look at the headers sent by the browser to the server and found out that `$_SERVER['HTTP_ACCEPT_CHARSET'] === null`