Wierdly lost utf8 characters when inserting into the database

[eluser]Nameless One[/eluser]
The collation in the database is utf8_general_ci. In config/database.php, I have set:

Code:

$db['admin']['char_set'] = "utf8";
$db['admin']['dbcollat'] = "utf8_general_ci";

I hope this automatically does SET NAMES 'utf8'. I've been using utf8_general_ci and SET NAMES 'utf8' for years without problems. I also tried to turn off the global xss filtering and it didn't help, so I guess ActiveRecord is the problem.