title: php using utf8 without utf_encode
body: <p>i'm running a german website which gets content from a mysql database.
  i've defined the charset as utf8 as following:</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;meta http-equiv='Content-Type' content='text/html;charset=utf-8' /&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>the problem is, when fetching + displaying contents from the database i always need to use utf8_encode in order to get the proper german "umlauts".</p>
  
  <p>i want to maintain the utf8 charset for my web as i'll have to add more languages which have special characters.</p>
  
  <p>any ideas on how to 1:1 echo database contents without having to utf8_encode?</p>
  
  <p>thanks</p>