Character set problem, can anybody guide me.

I am facing some problem when i try to display thai and russian language characters on my web page, the characters are not displaying correctly. I have used utf8_encode() method when saving characters and utf8_decode() method when displaying it.

Also the page encoding is

content="text/html; charset=utf-8"

but still it is not working correctly.

I have tried this sentence which is in russian.

Используйте расширенный поиск для ограничения поиска по языку и стране, без перевода поиска фразу.

but it is displaying like that.

Исп 86;льз& #1091;йте рас 96;ире& #1085;ный поиск для огр 72;нич& #1077;ния поиска по языку и стране, без пер 77;вода поиска фразу.

Is this what you're talking about:
http://www.php.net/utf8-decode
http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2006/01/turning_mysql_data_in_latin1_t.html

http://www.htmlforums.com/serverside-scripting-tutorials/t-phpmysql-and-charsets-91299.html

You dont use utf8_decode/encode at all as it's not needed here.