I'm very glad that MySQL eventually supports utf-8 encoding. Reading the manual the question arises: "HOW?".

Basically I'd like to be introduced to the art of using this new UTF-8 feature. Asian websites are growing in number at the same speed of asian economy. It would be wise to learn how to develop websites for our asien friends as well.

Here is my working environment (probably common to quite a few developers):

mySQL DB (4.1 release)
PHP
flash MX 2004

My desiderata:
1) populate the db with japanese/chinese text using utf8 encoding (so far every attempt failed, MySQL presenting me stuff like ウェブ イメ&#12540 after the insert)
2) select the data using PHP and sending it to flash

I'd like also to do viceversa. Collect (text field in a form) user input from a japanese/chinese keyboard and send it ti MySQL via PHP

Thanks for your help. I think this is so important feature that it need to be explained a little better than it is now.

Marco