Uft-8 and php

This is doing my head in and after about 5 attempts and multiple google searches I cannot for the life of me get this to work

I've got special characters such as ✫★ in my database. The fields are all set to utf-8 in phpmyadmin

When I try and output the fields on a php page, they're all showing as ??'s

I've tried a few methods now and I can't get it to show properly.

Anyone got any ideas on how to do it / can tell me how they've done it themselves?

Cheers :)

Joe

I managed to get it working, by removing something else I'd included as a way to fix it.

I am going, to scream! haha

PS Apologies for double post