Trouble with UTF-8 characters; what I see is not what I stored
<p>I tried to use UTF-8 and ran into trouble.</p>

<p>I have tried so many things; here are the results I have gotten:</p>

<ul>
<li><code>????</code> instead of Asian characters. Even for European text, I got <code>Se?or</code> for <code>Señor</code>.</li>
<li>Strange gibberish (Mojibake?) such as <code>SeÃ±or</code> or <code>æ–°æµªæ–°é—»</code> for <code>新浪新闻</code>.</li>
<li>Black diamonds, such as Se�or.</li>
<li>Finally, I got into a situation where the data was lost, or at least truncated: <code>Se</code> for <code>Señor</code>.</li>
<li>Even when I got text to <em>look</em> right, it did not <em>sort</em> correctly.</li>
</ul>

<p>What am I doing wrong? How can I fix the <em>code</em>? Can I recover the <em>data</em>, if so, how?</p>