Problems with unicode in forms

[eluser]XploD[/eluser]
Hello. I'm new to CodeIgniter and a PHP newbie. I started following the tutorial in guide and I'm already facing problems with it. I created the form for news in tutorial and unicode characters (like čšćđ) doesn't work. When I echo them in HTML, they work (I'm using

Code:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" c charset=UTF-8" />

in my header.php), but when submiting them through form into database, I get ? instead of that characters. I tried utf_unicode_ci collation but it doesn't work neither.

Furthermore, the function for generating slug from title deletes that characters. For example, my title is "Testč" and the generated slug is "test" but I want it to be "testc" so č goes to c, ć to c, đ to d, š to s etc.

Please help.