When using PDO to connect to MySQL it is wise to explicitly set the character set to utf8 (of course, only when using utf8 is the charset). In the MySQL or MySQLi extension I would normally execute the query SET NAMES utf8 to set it.
In PDO the charset can be specified in the connection string:
$conn = new PDO("mysql:host=$host;dbname=$db;charset=utf8", $user, $pass);The charset option is only used since PHP 5.3.6, so take this into account when running an older version of PHP. In that case you should run the following statement after constructing the PDO object:
$conn->exec('SET NAMES utf8');But you should’nt be running such an old version of PHP anyway.