php and cyrillics (possibly others)

hi everyone i already checked the archives on this one, to no avail. apparantly php doesn't treat cyrillic characters quite correctly, or i don't get it; and this is an example: let's say i have a cyrillic string which i want to post to another script which then again inserts it (into oracle). i have tried all possible encoding settings and nothing worked. all that gets inserted is '??????'. i'm pretty sure it's not the oci8 extension causing the problem here, since there are no character set options for ocistmtprepare and ocistmtexecute. where could i look further? thx and cheers! Abdul