charset issue with mysql

I'm trying to store the following line in mysql:

$data = "After 30μs, what fraction of the charge will remain?"

If I display $data on HTML Page I get the exact text but if i store this in database then i get this data on output I get the following :

After 30Î?s, what fraction of the charge will remain?

I have set charset=utf-8 but even then i'm not able to access the proper data with all开发者_开发百科 the symbols. Is there anything I'm missing ????

You need to set database connection encoding:

mysql_set_charset('utf8');

Or similar method, depending on your database library.

Whats your MySQL server's default charset and collation? Try executing the following query before any other queries inside your scripts.

SET NAMES utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci;

BTW, are we talking about a MySQL server?

Make sure your column's charset is utf-8, then use this method for inserting:

INSERT INTO my_table VALUES( 
    _utf8'After 30μs, what fraction of the charge will remain?', ...
);

and this for reading:

SELECT BINARY my_column FROM my_table;