Yet another UTF-8 problem.

HeidiSQL doesn't display multibyte characters correctly.
It looks like HeidiSQL tries to display them as singlebyte characters. For example, the swedish character 'å' is displayed as 'Ã¥', the japanese character '機' is displayed as 'æ©Ÿ'.

My website displays the same multibyte characters correctly. (I'm using a "Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8" header and utf-8 charset meta tag in the html.)
In HeidiSQL, i can use 'SET NAMES latin1' and then it shows the characters correctly. (I don't understand why though.)

Is this normal behaviour in HeidiSQL? Is there anything I can do to get around the problem?

Server variables:

"Variable_name";"Value"
"character_set_client";"utf8"
"character_set_connection";"utf8"
"character_set_database";"utf8"
"character_set_filesystem";"binary"
"character_set_results";"utf8"
"character_set_server";"utf8"
"character_set_system";"utf8"
"collation_connection";"utf8_general_ci"
"collation_database";"utf8_unicode_ci"
"collation_server";"utf8_unicode_ci"
"init_connect";"SET collation_connection = utf8_unicode_ci; SET NAMES utf8;"

My database has character set utf8, collation utf8_unicode_ci.
My tables are created with 'DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8'.

Whith PHP, I get these variables instead:

character_set_client latin1
character_set_connection latin1
character_set_database utf8
character_set_filesystem binary
character_set_results latin1
character_set_server utf8
character_set_system utf8
character_sets_dir c:\wamp\bin\mysql\mysql5.0.51a\share\charsets\
collation_connection latin1_swedish_ci
collation_database utf8_general_ci
collation_server utf8_unicode_ci
init_connect SET collation_connection = utf8_unicode_ci; SET NAMES utf8;

That can't be right.

Solved.
Was the result of a bad conversion from an old latin1 database and the wrong charset used in mysql connections from PHP.
A proper db conversion and the use of "SET NAMES utf8" in PHP did the trick.

Great to get an update, even before I tried to dive into that - thanks!

Hmm...I still have some utf-8 problem. with Japanese...
smartphone
地域包括ケアクラウドサービス「メディカルケアステーション」の is displayed as square symbols

That's mostly due to a font which is not capable of displaying Japanese characters. Try setting an appropriate font in Tools > Preferences > Data appearance.

It works with "MicroSoft YaHei" or any of the fonts starting with @

Glad to hear that!