Character set problems

I'm having a hard time figuring out why my character sets and data look when when viewed in phpAdmin when browsing the table-columns, but then I go to show the data on my web-page with PHP, I get garbage-characters where I should be seeing apostrophs and special foreign-characters. I copied all the header-data from the phpAdmin pages: <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en" dir="ltr"> <head> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" /> where the characters all show up properly, and I've put this on my web-page. Here's what I know about my database, according to myphpadmin: From the phpAdmin settings page: MySQL charset: UTF-8 Unicode (utf8) MySQL connection collation: utf8_unicode_ci From the Structure tab for my table: Type: MyISAM Collation: utf8_unicode_ci So, based on the headers I'm using, and the myphpAdmin settings, is there something I'm missing? I guess I was assuming since the headers are set for utf-8, and the "MySQL charset = UTF-8 Unicode (utf8)", that everything would be compatible.