Well, If you just set the collation as “utf8-general-ci” that wont do all the things for storing and retrieving bangla unicode texts properly. There are something more to do. Last night while working for a project I just found the solution.

You must add these two lines just after selecting the database, i.e mysql_select_db() function.

mysql_query(‘SET CHARACTER SET utf8’);
mysql_query(“SET SESSION collation_connection =’utf8_general_ci'”);

After executing these two statements MySQL will handle the rest.