I have just transformed my site to utf-8 (Apache is defaulting to utf-8 instead of iso..).

The admin side saves any letter after a to z as weird characters (like Ã¥, while it should be å). But then it shows the links/description correctly on my site (frontend). I can do a replace on all characters from the normal å to the weird Ã¥, but it doesn't look good in the db?

What is causing this?

I have digged more into this..

From what I can understand, the mysql_client is always using latin-1, no matter if the mysql server is running utf-8. You can't change this any other way than spesifying the charset utf-8 each time you create a connection. I do have full access to mysql configuration, but this can't be changed from configuration. Is there one place in the perl script where connections always is done?

— #1 : The MySQL server was using UTF8 encoding.
— #2 : The MySQL client was using latin1 encoding.

Must send this on every query:
mysql_query('SET NAMES utf8');

This causing the utf-8 setting in admin area to create weird characters. While it looks OK when you create a new category in utf-8, the data is really garbaged in the mysql database (that is utf-8) and you can only see this by using phpMyAdmin or doing a View source in the browser.

Need some help here...