Russian Language characters showing as ????? chars

[Ms_X]

Either is fine. Before is okay. After is okay.

Dr Byte,

Thanks a lot for your help...

I am still with the same problem :if I change russian.php file's encoding to utf without BOM, then instead of russian words on the websote i see funny characters. If I change encoding back to ANSI,everything looks fine again.

[DrByte]

So, when you have things set so CHARSET and LC_TIME etc are set to appropriate values for russian characters, you say you're getting garbage on the screen.
When that happens, click your browser's View menu, and look at the Character Encoding section. What's it set to?
Then click your browser's View menu and choose View Source / View Page Source. What does it say near the top for lang= and charset= ?

[numinix]

DrByte, I have done the my_db_charset.php suggestion both on the admin and catalog side. However, the admin is still showing the question mark symbol � instead of ™. The changes to english.php have also been done, database updated to utf8_general_ci, etc. Everything on the catalog side is showing as expected.

[DrByte]

So, which piece is not UTF8 then? Lang file? Database content? Browser display?