helo. i'm having some difficulties with characters sets and collation
that probably spans across three distinct areas: a mysql table,
showing the contents on a site with php, and the input of data. until
now i thought everything was working just fine, but now it seems that
something is wrong. here's the situation.

my tables have columns with the character set utf8, for which i've
tried various collations, including slovenian (which is the primary
language of most of the data). in fact, it seemed to work: the data is
displayed correctly on my site that sends ot the header "Content-Type:
text/html; charset=utf-8".

but when i want to get the time and date from mysql in slovenian ("SET
lc_time_names = 'sl_SI'") our specific characters aren't shown
correctly -- even though they are when reading data from my tables.

as of sorting: the order is not right. the accentuated characters come
out at the top.

so i starting to wonder that maybe my way of inputting the data was
wrong. i use linux and vim to type my data. vim uses the options
"encoding=utf-8" and "fileencoding=utf-8". for instance, the letter
`è' (latin small letter c with caron) has the unicode code u+010d,
which is what i use in my map file for vim.

any pointers greatly appreciated, thanks,
andrej