trouble with utf-8 chars & apache2 rewrite rules

I see the post http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2565864/validating-utf-8-in-htaccess-rewrite-rule and I think that is great, but a more fundamental problem I am having first:

Getting ’ instead of an apostrophe(") in PHP

I'v tried converting the text to or from utf8… didn't seem to help

Android UTF-8 edittext not displayed

I want to display some UTF-8 characters (upside down) in my edittext:

Korean characters not displaying when pulled from MS Access database using php

I have an Access DB which contains a load of people with Korean names. I hava a classic asp site (which i inherited) that reads data from the DB quite happily and displays it properly. I am now developing a different site in php, but it is unable to display korean characters at all. I have written two very simple scripts, one in asp and one in php to work out why.

UTF-8 problems while reading CSV file with fgetcsv

I try to read a CSV and echo the content. But the content displays the characters wrong.

Reading Unicode characters from MySQL with PHP

I've inherited a MySQL database which contains a field named Description of type text and collation of latin1_swedish_ci .