Comment 1 for bug 268874

Seconded! LOUDLY!

I have gone through a lot of pain to realise this. My post here: http://combatwombat.7doves.com/2008/10/26/mysql-latin1-to-utf8-issues tells of how to fix the issue in detail.

It's a Mysql transport issue.

Web browser(utf8)<---->PHP app (utf8) <----->Mysql(Latin1 (8859-1))<----->Database(utf8)

results in bad encoding for characters on screen.

Ubuntu needs to change the default to UTF8, then let everyone know of this change. My Web host- bluehost.com - uses Ubuntu servers, as do I locally, and this is how have verified it.