Re: Special characters and database

[Rick James]

Virtually all known languages (including Klingon) are representable in UTF-8.

You are missing SET NAMES utf8 right after connecting. (Maybe you have the settings buried somewhere.) But be cautious about simply adding that -- the Cyrillic in you tables may actually be double-encoded. Suggest you check by finding a short value in your database and
SELECT length(cell), char_length(cell), hex(cell) FROM tbl WHERE ...;
For Cyrillic properly encoded in utf8, I would expect length to be twice char_length since Cyrillic characters take 2 bytes each. (3 for Chinese, Japanese, and most other Asian character sets.)