I have did it for PHP older versions:
<?php require_once('Connections/SQLConn.php');
mysql_query("SET NAMES 'utf8'"); ?>
Now i want to update this obsolete code in order to update to PHP 5.6, well i tried with htmlentities(), htmlspecialchars(), changing by mysqli and it doesn't work.
example of typical black rhombus
My local database is collated by latin1_swedish_ci because my website is ready for both Spanish and English languages, and every single table of my db are collated by utf8_spanish_ci (if necessary for you to know it).