The following articles will be useful:
10.3 Specifying Character Sets and Collations
10.4 Connection Character Sets and Collations
After you connect to the database, issue the following command:
SET NAMES 'utf8';
Ensure that your web page also uses the UTF-8 encoding:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
PHP also offers several functions that will be useful for conversions: