title: UTF-8 special characters not retrieved from database
body: <p>I have a MySQL database including words in all kinds of languages, therefore I set the table columns to "utf8_unicode_ci". UTF-8 can include all possible characters and the unicode_ci also has correct sorting (and lower performance). All special character looks OK when I browse the table in phpMyAdmin. The problem is when I SQL SELECT a bunch of names and display them on my web site the characters can't be displayed/are not encoded right (looks like question marks in Chrome, squares in Explorer etc.). I’ve got the right encoding for my site: 
  <code>&lt;meta HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=UTF-8"&gt;</code> I can also display all kinds of characters if I paste them on my page. The problem only shows up when retrieving them from the database. Does the php mysqli_query() change the encoding or does the SELECT query somehow mess it up?</p>