Characters not displaying correctly on a UTF-8 website

Question

I've done everything I can think of, but special characters are not displaying correctly on this webpage.

For example, in the database it's:

But on the site it's:

Nouveaux R�alistes

Here's everything I've checked...

The database is set to UTF-8:

The page was written in NetBeans, with the document encoding set to UTF-8:

The page header declares UTF-8:

The meta charset is set to UTF-8:

I've even added the following line to my .htacess:

But there characters are still not displaying correctly, and I get the following error from the W3C Validator:

I feel like I've attempted everything, but it still won't work. (I've even tried htmlspecialchars and htmlentities in PHP, but the page doesn't even render!)

---

UPDATE
As requested, here is the code I'm using:

class Exhibition {
    public $exhibitionDetails;    

    public function __construct(Database $db, $exhibitionID){
        $this->_db = $db;

        $params['ExhibitionID'] = $exhibitionID;

        $STH = $this->_db->prepare("SELECT * 
            FROM Exhibition
            INNER JOIN Schedule
                ON Exhibition.ExhibitionID = Schedule.ExhibitionID            
            WHERE Schedule.Visible = 1
                AND Exhibition.ExhibitionID = :ExhibitionID;");

        $STH->execute($params);

        $this->exhibitionDetails = $STH->fetchAll(PDO::FETCH_ASSOC);

    }
}

And...

try {
    $db = new Database(SITE_ROOT."/../");
    $db->setAttribute(PDO::ATTR_ERRMODE, PDO::ERRMODE_EXCEPTION);
    $exhibition = new Exhibition($db,$_GET['id']);
} catch (PDOException $e) {
    echo "<p class='error'>ERROR: ".$e->getMessage()."</p>";
}

And finally...

<p><?php echo $exhibition->exhibitionDetails[0]["Desc"]; ?></p>

Answer 1

If you are using mysql_* functions:

mysql_query("SET NAMES 'utf8'");

If you are using PDO

$dsn = 'mysql:host=localhost;dbname=testdb';
$username = 'username';
$password = 'password';
$options = array(
    PDO::MYSQL_ATTR_INIT_COMMAND => 'SET NAMES utf8',
); 

$dbh = new PDO($dsn, $username, $password, $options);

It sets connection encoding.

Answer 2

It's been a few years since I've used PHP but back then it didn't natively support Unicode and a quick search of google tells me it still doesn't. You can still make it work though.

Here's a great link:

Encodings And Character Sets To Work With Text