Problems with UTF8

[eluser]gh05t[/eluser]
The problem persists. Any other ideas?


I've added

Code:

[mysqld]
skip-character-set-client-handshake=1
default-character-set=utf8

in my.cnf

all the variables (character_set_client, character_set_result etc.) are now UTF8. but echo mysql_client_encoding() still returns 'latin1'. Is there any way to convert latin1 to utf8 explicitly? I've tried

Code:

mb_convert_encoding($str,'UTF8','latin1');

but it doesn't work

edit #2:
now I'm really confused, mb_detect_encoding shows that the string is in UTF8, but it still doesn't display characters properly. What the hell is going on?