Why are special characters from the database being killed on a remote server?

Question

PHP

I debugged the site on my home computer, already with a remote database (on VDS). Then I uploaded the site to Apache on the same remote server, connected to the same database, and I see that all the special characters received from the database were killed in the content.
What is killing them? Since there is no such problem with the local Apache / PHP, then the problem is in the remote ones, but this is definitely not MySQL. How to fix?
Everywhere PHP 7, Apache 2.4, MySQL 5.7 . Used by pdo_mysql

Answer 1

;charset=utf8 в dsn решило проблему. Почему же на локальном ПК не было кракозябр? Это значение где-то устанавливается по умолчанию?