To confirm, is the actual Charset value set this way in the response headers, too? i.e. Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8 -- regardless of what you have in the source, what really matters to most browsers is the actual header being received...
I personally use the Fx WebDeveloper toolbar and select Information --> View Response Headers.
Next step, do the actual tables in the database have the proper collation? And if so, when you look at the data in phpMyAdmin using a utf8 connection charset setting, does the data appear properly?
In phpmyadmin it appears that way??!
Also, I’m willing to bet that having the db set to utf8_unicode_ci while the tables have utf8_general_ci could be the problem. Try changing the db collation to match the actual collation on the table columns it contains.
Also, I’m willing to bet that having the db set to utf8_unicode_ci while the tables have utf8_general_ci could be the problem. Try changing the db collation to match the actual collation on the table columns it contains.
(Sorry, I edited the answer after you posted yes, so thought I’d repost since you didn’t reply to this part...)