Problems with character encoding

Hello list,

    I know that what I'm about to ask does not concern databases exclusively but please guys help. I am retrieving all the records from a mysql (myisam) table using PDO and I am trying to write it to an spreadsheet using php. Whenever I use English while writing into the spreadsheet everything works smoothly but when I use greek retrieved from the database nothing seems to do the job. I have used utf8_encode/utf8_encode, iconv and I have just compiled multi-byte encoding into php (mbstring) and used mb_convert_encoding() to convert the encoding but it still doesn't do the trick for me. Does anybody have previous experience concerning charset encoding in order to help me.

Thanks in advance. PS: I am writing in sreadsheet format using Spreadsheet_Excel_Writer pear module* * -- Thodoris