title: Characters not displaying correctly on a UTF-8 website
body: <p>I've done everything I can think of, but special characters are not displaying correctly on this webpage.</p>
  
  <p>For example, in the database it's:</p>
  
  <p><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/UXfTL.png" alt="enter image description here"></p>
  
  <p>But on the site it's:</p>
  
  <pre><code>Nouveaux R�alistes
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Here's everything I've checked...</p>
  
  <p>The database is set to UTF-8:</p>
  
  <p><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/ClKX5.png" alt="enter image description here"></p>
  
  <p>The page was written in NetBeans, with the document encoding set to UTF-8:</p>
  
  <p><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/s7djn.png" alt="enter image description here"></p>
  
  <p>The page header declares UTF-8:</p>
  
  <p><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/MBjno.png" alt="enter image description here"></p>
  
  <p>The meta charset is set to UTF-8:</p>
  
  <p><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/fua7X.png" alt="enter image description here"></p>
  
  <p>I've even added the following line to my .htacess:</p>
  
  <p><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/HqxrN.png" alt="enter image description here"></p>
  
  <p>But there characters are still not displaying correctly, and I get the following error from the W3C Validator:</p>
  
  <p><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/E5CHa.png" alt="enter image description here"></p>
  
  <p>I feel like I've attempted everything, but it still won't work. (I've even tried <code>htmlspecialchars</code> and <code>htmlentities</code> in PHP, but the page doesn't even render!)</p>
  
  <hr>
  
  <p><strong>UPDATE</strong><br>
  As requested, here is the code I'm using:</p>
  
  <pre><code>class Exhibition {
      public $exhibitionDetails;    
  
      public function __construct(Database $db, $exhibitionID){
          $this-&gt;_db = $db;
  
          $params['ExhibitionID'] = $exhibitionID;
  
          $STH = $this-&gt;_db-&gt;prepare("SELECT * 
              FROM Exhibition
              INNER JOIN Schedule
                  ON Exhibition.ExhibitionID = Schedule.ExhibitionID            
              WHERE Schedule.Visible = 1
                  AND Exhibition.ExhibitionID = :ExhibitionID;");
  
          $STH-&gt;execute($params);
  
          $this-&gt;exhibitionDetails = $STH-&gt;fetchAll(PDO::FETCH_ASSOC);
  
      }
  }
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>And...</p>
  
  <pre><code>try {
      $db = new Database(SITE_ROOT."/../");
      $db-&gt;setAttribute(PDO::ATTR_ERRMODE, PDO::ERRMODE_EXCEPTION);
      $exhibition = new Exhibition($db,$_GET['id']);
  } catch (PDOException $e) {
      echo "&lt;p class='error'&gt;ERROR: ".$e-&gt;getMessage()."&lt;/p&gt;";
  }
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>And finally...</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;p&gt;&lt;?php echo $exhibition-&gt;exhibitionDetails[0]["Desc"]; ?&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
  </code></pre>