if you want something done right… DIY.

meanderings of a computer scientist on the brink of sheer insanity.

if, after painfully specifying character set and collation for your database, all your tables, and all columns within them, you’re still experiencing discrepencies between what your database is storing (eg. strings appear correct from within phpMyAdmin) versus what your website is displaying from database query results (question marks instead of your fancy quotes), try this:
mysql_query(”SET […]

utf-8 latvian german

for your copy-paste convenience:
ā č ē ģ ī ķ ļ ņ š ū ž
ä ö ü ß