POST Cyrillic letters PHP results in special characters

Question

Cyrillic letters are posting as spec symbols in db.

here is my php code

    <?php 
    header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8');
    include("../connection.php");
    $data = json_decode(file_get_contents("php://input"));
    $address = "Коля";
    $description = $data->description;
    $alt = $data->lat;
    $lon= $data->lng;
    $q = "INSERT INTO pitches (address, description,alt,lon) VALUES (:address, :description,:alt,:lon)";
    $query = $db->prepare($q);
    $execute = $query->execute(array(
        ":address" =>  $address,
        ":description" => $description,
        ":alt"=>$alt,
        ":lon"=>$lon

    ));
    echo mb_detect_encoding($description);

    ?>

Also I've added .htaccess file to root of my site with AddDefaultCharset UTF-8

Here are my screenshots from phpmyadmin:

I have utf8 encoding everywhere but still my php posts me data like this КолÑ. I've tried everything I knew but can't understand what's wrong.

echo mb_detect_encoding($description) shows me ANSII,
echo mb_detect_encoding($address) shows me UTF-8 Will be really thankful for help.

Answer 1

Have you tried mysql set charset?

<?php
$con=mysqli_connect("localhost","my_user","my_password","my_db");
// Check connection
if (mysqli_connect_errno())
  {
  echo "Failed to connect to MySQL: " . mysqli_connect_error();
  }

// Change character set to utf8
mysqli_set_charset($con,"utf8");

mysqli_close($con);
?>