charaters from geoname UTF8 table display as latin1 - how to correct this?

[Ivan Gutschy]

Hi,

First to say that I am using Linux CentOS with Cpanel and MySql.

I have acquired geoname tables for countries and cities. They are set as utf8 tables. So I have imported them as utf8. most od other tables were created as default latin1.
And in phpmyadmin i see characters as they should be.

The problem is when i am displaying them on my website.
I have set
<code>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
</code>
in my header. Other tables (the ones with latin1) are displaying characters correctly, alghough they are stored differently.

i have tried with
<code>
mysql_set_charset('utf8_general_ci',$dbc);
</code>
as well as
<code>
mysql_query("SET NAMES 'utf8'", $dbc);
</code>
but nothing changed.

this is block of code that selects countries and then cities based on country selection
<code>
$kveri="SELECT ccode FROM all_countries WHERE country_name = '$country_sel'";
$kveri_result = mysqli_query($dbc, $kveri);
$row=mysqli_fetch_array($kveri_result, MYSQLI_ASSOC);
$ccode=$row['ccode'];

$qc="select * from gradovi where ccode='$ccode' ORDER BY city ASC ";
$rc=mysqli_query($dbc, $qc);
// $rc = mb_convert_encoding($rc, "UTF-8");
$citys=array();
while($row=mysqli_fetch_array($rc, MYSQLI_ASSOC))
{
$ic=true;
foreach($citys as $k=>$value)
{
if($value==$row['city'])
{
$ic=false;
break;
}
}
if($ic)
{
$citys[]=$row['city'];
}
}
</code>

Any help is appreciated. I am not an expert programmer as you can see so I ask for your patience.

Thank you.