mySQL and UTF-8 character display using PHP

Many developers face character rendering issues when fetching UTF-8 stings from a mySQL database using PHP. Even though the page character encoding is set to UTF-8 and the database collation is also set to utf8_general_ci.

For me the problem was resolved by sending the following query from PHP:

 mysql_query("SET NAMES utf8");

just after using mysql_connect and mysql_select_db PHP functions.