While working with UTF-8 in my application, these are all the places I've had to configure to work correctly:

1. Add the following line to prepend.inc:
   

   public static $EncodingType = 'UTF-8';
   

2. The DB needs to store the data as UTF-8
3. When connecting to the DB, the connection needs to support UTF-8. In particular, you need to add 'encoding' => 'utf8' to your DB Connection array if you use MySQL. Sample (in configuration.inc):
   

   define('DB_CONNECTION_1', serialize(array(
      'adapter' => 'MySqli5',  
      'server' => 'localhost',  
      'port' => null,  
      'database' => 'mydatabase',  
      'username' => 'root',  
      'password' => 'password',  
      'profiling' => false,  
      'encoding' => 'utf8'
   )));
   

4. Alternative option is to add this line to prepend.inc:
   

   if (QApplication::$EncodingType == 'UTF-8') {
      QApplication::$Database[1]->NonQuery("SET NAMES 'utf8'");
   }
   
   

5. Your pages must have a Content-Type meta tag with charset=UTF-8
6. If you have accented characters in your code, your php/html files must be saved in UTF-8 format (notepad can do this).
7. Several common functions in PHP 5.2 lack unicode support, causing them to work improperly. There are custom function work-arounds posted on the php.net function pages. Be wary of all PHP string functions for versions < 5.3
   • strlen()
   • substr()
   • must call htmlentities with additional parameters: htmlentities('mystring', ENT_COMPAT, UTF-8)
     • QApplication::HtmlEntities? does this automatically

Once that was all done, everything seems to work, be self-consistant, and the accented characters show up with my DB tools, etc.

(authored by VexedPanda?)