Strange characters; du to Latin-1 in stead of utf8 in database?

While moving/testing to a different webserver (Digital Ocean), there do appear strange characters at the cms output on the page.

The chinese text is completely unreadable, see screenshot.

Digital Ocean refers to info below:
https://www.blueboxcloud.com/insight/blog-article/getting-out-of-mysql-character-set-hell

What solution do you suggest?

Update your database charset to utf-8 for the columns you are having trouble with... then make sure that the pages also have utf-8 charset defined in the meta tags.

Ok, thanks for the advice!

Still not working completely. The charset of all colums are set to utf-8 but the problem gets strange.

At Digital Ocean it seems to be ok, but on 2 other servers (1 for testing and 1 for production) the characters are messed up.

I have made screenshots of 2 situations:
Situation 1: This is the old used setup I use last year - website is working, cms is working, corresponding database is messed up
Situation 2: This is a test to see what happens when I make the database correct: both website as cms are messed up

At Digital Ocean, a correct database delivers a working website and CMS. So this is the set-up as it should be. All files are an exact copy 1 on 1.

How to solve this?

Does the content look correct in the database? If it got inserted wrong in the first place and it is garbled in the database, then there may not be a fix other than to re-enter the content with the correct encoding.

If you give me FTP access and a URL and steps to reproduce the issue I can debug it and see if I can find a solution.

The content is inserted correctly and the database messed it up. Will send the ftp access later as it is weekend here in europe.
Thanks!

See pm

Try adding this to the bottom of your connection file:

mysql_set_charset('utf8',$PowerCMSConnection);

It looks like you aren't setting the charset in the database connection itself.. that might be causing the disconnect.

For some reason I was having a hard time debugging with the information you gave me... When I ftp changes the pages weren't changing and when I updated the database it appeared to be pointing to another database... I'm not sure what was going on but it was like I had connection information for different sites.

Thanks Ray, tested One page and your solutions looks promising. Adding "mysql_set_charset('utf8',$PowerCMSConnection);" to the connection file does the trick apparently.

Tested the complete site and works. Only inline editing is still messing caracters. I can disable inline editing for now, but it would be nice if it worked for future use. see pm.

Regards, Stuward