That means that your source data is going through two charset conversions before being sent to the browser:

В любом случае, начните с онлайн-декодера, чтобы понять с какими кодировками есть смысл работать.

If the ’ character is correctly there, then you are most likely not correctly connecting to the database from your program. You basically need to reconfigure the database connector to use UTF-8. How to do that depends on the database being used.

I know this is an answer to a very old question, but was facing the issue once again. Some old windows machine didnt encoded the text correct before inserting it to the utf8_general_ci collated table.

That is the recommended way when building PHP projects from scratch. While it would probably fix the problem the OP shows, fixing the problem at its root (if possible) is much preferable.

This only instructs the client which encoding to use to interpret and display the characters. This doesn't instruct your own program which encoding to use to read, write, store, and display the characters in.

The exact answer depends on the server side platform / database / programming language used. Do note that the one set in HTTP response header has precedence over the HTML meta tag. The HTML meta tag would then only

Unicode is a computer coding system that aims to unify text exchanges at the international level. With Unicode, each computer character is described by a name and a code (codepoint), identifying it uniquely regardless of the computer medium or the software used. Unicode has already listed over 100000 characters.

If this is your issue, then usually just altering the table to use UTF-8 is sufficient. If your database doesn't support that, you'll need Ïàìÿíèêè íà ìîãèëó âîåííûì â Ìîñêâå to recreate the tables. It is good practice to set the encoding of the table when you create it.

Алфавит этого странного компьютерного языка знаю назубок, им более чем удобно шифроваться, учитывая то, что в интернете сделал все эти символы.

Âñ¸ áûëî áóêâàëüíî íà ãðàíè êàòàñòðîôû. Íî ðÿäîì áûëè öâåòû â ãîðøêàõ, è íåîáîææ¸ííûå ñîñíû, è òðóùèåñÿ î íîãè ñîáàêè, è ðåñòîðàí, îòêðûòûé äëÿ óæèíà; è ÷óâñòâîâàëîñü, ÷òî âñå íà óëèöå âçäûõàþò ñ áëàãîäàðíîñòüþ çà òî, ÷òî âñ¸ ýòî ó íèõ åù¸ åñòü. Õîòÿ áû íåíàäîëãî (Äèàíà Ìàðêóì, Äåñÿòûé îñòðîâ).

This is most likely where your problem lies. You need to verify with an independent database tool what the data looks like.

If the other answers haven't helped, you might want to check whether your database is actually storing the mojibake characters. I was viewing the text in utf-8, but I was still seeing the mojibake and it turned out that, due to a database upgrade, the text had been permanently "mojibaked".

Люди в Гроувленде, маленьком (по меркам Калифорнии) городке в шестьсот жителей, выходили на улицы, стояли перед своими домами с цветами на подоконниках вдобавок смотрели, до какой мере этот пирокумулюс вырастает выше Сьерры-Невады. Я вдобавок сама стояла там в благоговении и ужасе как и понимала без всяких слов, что если не пойдет дождь, то следующие пожары будут вдругорядь ужаснее, а если дожди однако пойдут также окажутся слишком обильными, то это сожжённые горные склоны смоет наводнениями.