Getting Question marks for German characters in HTML using PHP and MySQL

Question

I have done quite a bit of searching and still can't seem to figure this out, so I apologize if there's a perfectly good answer out there.

I'm using PHP to access German words in MySQL and the unique characters (öäüß) show up as �.

I've tried

• Setting the Character set of the table to UTF8 with:

  ALTER TABLE Words CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci;
  

• Setting the communication link between PHP and MySQL to UTF8 (probably not correct terminology) after making the connection with:

  mysql_query("SET NAMES utf8");
  

  (as well as similar things like:

  mysql_query("set character_set_client='utf8'");
  mysql_query("set character_set_results='utf8'");
  mysql_query("set collation_connection='utf8_unicode_ci'");
  mysql_set_charset('utf8', $conn);
  

• Setting the header response to send in UTF8 with:

  header("Content-type: text/html; charset=UTF-8");
  

• My page does include the meta tag:

  <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
  

I'm using NetBeans and it's saving in UTF8. I can add the characters directly to the HTML and they display correctly.

I hope that all makes sense. Sorry if I've forgotten something important. Thanks very much for any help!