Encoding in PHP and MySQL, why are question marks displayed?

Question

PHP

I have data in Russian in the MySql database, which are displayed as question marks, I tried English, and even it came out like that.
PHP files encoding is utf-8, databases utf8_general_ci.
mb_internal_encoding("UTF-8") doesn't help, mysql_query('set names utf8') does too.
Why are question marks displayed?

Answer 1

I rummaged through a bunch of articles, exhaustive manuals from people who got sick of similar questions on the forums, and nothing helped, even if you crack.
But I found a solution, you need to specify the necessary encoding in this line in the my.cnf (my.ini) file init-connect = "set names utf8"

Answer 2

<meta charset=“utf-8”>

Answer 3

google

Answer 4

my favorite article
and what does it say in the MySQL console? Are there questions too?

Answer 5

maybe you have files in utf-8 with BOM?

Answer 6

Try to merge the .sql dump and recode it to utf8, also check all DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8 and check config.