I'm in the first stages of developing a plug in to display the most popular entries of my blog, which is in mixed Russian and English, running b2evolution 2.4.2-stable-2008-04-27 under MySQL 5.0. The blog works perfectly, and most of the fields are in MySQL collation set utf8_general_ci.

The code I'm using is:

mysql_connect('myservername', 'myusername', 'mypassword') ;
mysql_select_db('mydatabase') ;

$query = 'SELECT * FROM evo_items__item ORDER BY post_views DESC LIMIT 0, 10' ;
$contents = mysql_query($query) ;
while ( $row = mysql_fetch_array($contents) )
	  {
	  print "{$row['post_views']} ";
	  print "{$row['post_urltitle']} ";
	  print "{$row['post_title']} \n";
	  }

This works perfectly except for one thing: the post_title values print out as a string of question marks. That is, the output looks like this:

725 guestbook Guest book & general comments. 
663 -27 ?????? ???? 
582 -114 ???????-??????? 
511 -116 ????? 
485 -115 ??????/???????? 
423 -189 ?????????, ???? 
407 -19 ????? 
404 -112 ?????????? ????? (????????? ?????) 
385 -161 ????? 
360 -119 ???????????? ?????

The html in which it is embedded has a properly marked UTF-8 header, specifically:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">

which works flawlessly in my normal Russian pages. What do I need to do differently to get the UTF-8 to work correctly? I suspect a problem in the hand off of the data from MySQL to PHP, but I don't see any place in either of them to specify that a data value is UTF-8. Any hints?