The problem is that reading UTF-8 from a web browser, then storing it in an 8-bit clean database (everything), and then displaying that binary data back to the

The problem is that reading UTF-8 from a web browser, then storing it in an 8-bit clean database (everything), and then displaying that binary data back to the web browser usually works OK. That sounds like something you could fix relatively easily. In my experience this does happen, but it's not with UTF-8, it's with Windows-1252.