After living in Japan for six years and doing web programming for most of that time, you would think I would have this down by now. I used many combos - from Lasso/FileMaker to PHP/MSSQL and even PHP/PostgreSQL - but never used PHP/MySQL for any CJVK work. So I did some Googling and found four pages that claimed to have the answer: Use UTF-8 No BOM for each page. That is Byte-Order Mark , which does help in other languages like Cold Fusion, but not for me in PHP. NOPE! Use a PHP header ta