Opening a UTF-8 connection to MySQL with PHP PDO

gistfile1.php

<?php
try {
  $dbh = new PDO('MySQL:host=localhost;dbname=example', 
            $username, $password,  
            array(PDO::MySQL_ATTR_INIT_COMMAND => 'SET NAMES utf8'));
} catch (PDOException $e) {
  // You probably want to handle DB failure better than this:
  die('Oh no, the database is dead!');
}
?>

See http://inanimatt.com/php-charsets.php for explanation