title: How to display UTF-8 characters in phpMyAdmin?
body: <p>I have my database properly set to UTF-8 and am dealing with a database containing Japanese characters.  If I do SELECT *... from the mysql command line, I properly see the Japanese characters.  When pulling data out of the database and displaying it on a webpage, I see it properly.</p>
  
  <p>However, when viewing the table data in phpMyAdmin, I just see garbage text.  ie.</p>
  
  <p>ç§ã¯æ—¥æœ¬æ–™ç†ãŒå¥½ãã§ã™ã€‚æ—¥æœ¬æ–™ç†ã‚...</p>
  
  <p>How can I get phpMyAdmin to display the characters in Japanese?</p>
  
  <p>The character encoding on the HTML page is set to UTF-8.</p>
  
  <p>Edit:</p>
  
  <p>I have tried an export of my database and opened up the .sql file in geany.  The characters are still garbled even though the encoding is set to UTF-8.  (However, doing a mysqldump of the database also shows garbled characters).</p>
  
  <p>The character set is set correctly for the database and all tables ('latin' is not found anywhere in the file)</p>
  
  <pre><code>CREATE DATABASE `japanese` DEFAULT CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I have added the lines to my.cnf and restarted mysql but there is no change.  I am using Zend Framework to insert data into the database.</p>
  
  <p>I am going to open a bounty for this question as I really want to figure this out.</p>