最高の答えは素晴らしいです。これが私が通常のdebian / php / mysqlセットアップでしなければならなかったものです:
// storage
// debian. apparently already utf-8
// retrieval
// the mysql database was stored in utf-8,
// but apparently php was requesting iso. this worked:
// ***notice "utf8", without dash, this is a mysql encoding***
mysql_set_charset('utf8');
// delivery
// php.ini did not have a default charset,
// (it was commented out, shared host) and
// no http encoding was specified in the apache headers.
// this made apache send out a utf-8 header
// (and perhaps made php actually send out utf-8)
// ***notice "utf-8", with dash, this is a php encoding***
ini_set('default_charset','utf-8');
// submission
// this worked in all major browsers once apache
// was sending out the utf-8 header. i didnt add
// the accept-charset attribute.
// processing
// changed a few commands in php, like substr,
// to mb_substr
それだけでした!