UTF-8 vs. utf8 – make accented characters appear

Over the last couple of days I have gone through number of posts about how UTF-8 encoding is good and handy, modern standard. Because it will display any character and is future proof. However when it came to writing special/accented characters for Central European languages I could not make it work!

On 2 fronts.
One – I could not find these characters in the ‘special characters’ tool in WYSIWYG – that is until I realised I could change the keyboard language and input them from the keyboard – much easier than than ‘&#number’ or pasting, etc.
Second – once I typed them in and saved the post they displayed as – so often reported on this forum – question marks!!!

After some trying and a lot of reading I was left with 2 solutions.
1. Stick to ISO-8859-2 – but I really wanted to be future proof and compliant with UTF
2. Blank out/comment out the following 2 lines in wp-config file, as suggested by a number of posts on this forum:
define(‘DB_CHARSET’, ‘utf8’);
define(‘DB_COLLATE’, ”);
This also worked but I did not really want to ‘hack’ the code which, as far as I understand, should work!

I believe I found a solution or perhaps a bug?
Everything works perfectly well with Unicode encoding if you use UTF-8.
You must ensure that:
1. you have – a default – ‘UTF-8’ set in WP admin screen under ‘Settings’ and ‘Reading’
2. That the following line in the wp-config file:
define(‘DB_CHARSET’, ‘utf8’);
has UTF-8 and not utf8 in it.
So the line should read:
define(‘DB_CHARSET’, ‘UTF-8’);

Hope you will find it helpful.
regards,
Peter