title: database stores strange characters
body: <p>I have problem between frontend liferay portal with php portlet and database. To describe situation: 
  I have a portlet - no matter what it does - which stores some strings to database. When I read the strings back to frontend every single "non-english" character is weird. I need to store a wide range of characters like Slovak, Czech, Polish, German, Romanian, etc. </p>
  
  <p>I'm pretty sure the problem is not in the front end because before I store it (or in the same time) I display what am I storing in the frontend and string looks ok. So UTF-8 in frontend works. But when I look in the DB, everything is mixed and there are characters like <code>ÃÂ³</code> and other combinations of these funny characters. </p>
  
  <p>My postgres database is also set to UTF-8. First I thought there is a connection with locales so I made every supported locale on my server working now. Still no help. I have one brute force solution to transform those characters to #xxxx; code but its real worky. </p>
  
  <p>Any advice?</p>
  
  <p>Thanks.</p>