MySQL, PHP and UTF-8

[Bryan M.]

I'm having problems getting my data to display properly in PHP pages. I'm using MySQL 4.1.x and PHP 4.3.10. Because I do so much translation work, I've set everything to default to UTF-8 on the MySQL side, so all of my tables, fields, etc. are all encoded using UTF-8. I've even set Apache to use UTF-8 as the default when it's sending headers.

But when I try connecting to MySQL in PHP and then do a mysql_client_encoding, it always returns latin1. I've even tried using "SET NAMES 'utf8'" and "SET CHARACTER SET utf8", but I still get the same results when asking for the client encoding. How can I set it to use UTF-8 (other than using the mysqli functions because I didn't build that extension into PHP)?

Here's a little example of what I've done:

mysql_query("SET CHARACTER SET utf8", $conn);
mysql_query("SELECT * FROM products", $conn);
$charset = mysql_client_encoding($conn);
echo $charset;

This always displays "latin1". Thanks for the help.