phpmyadmin displaying utf8 but site doesnt
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i created a table named 'items' with collation of utf-8_bin and when i went on inserting data, i inserted it in devnagari, for nepali, it all went good and when it came to displaying records, all the devnagari fonts will display as question marks like if i have written निश्चल then it would show up as ??????? but it shows correctly in phpmyadmin, i have already declared to use utf-8 on my page also, here is the header section of my page.

    <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
    <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
    <head>
    <meta name="keywords" content="" />
    <meta name="description" content="" />
    <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
    <meta charset="utf-8" />
    </head>
    <?php
    $sql="SELECT * FROM `swyamsewika`.`items`";
    mysql_connect("localhost","root","");
    $query=mysql_query($sql);
    $a=mysql_fetch_array($query);
    var_dump($a);
    ?>

if i type निश्चल in the page then it shows correctly. when i type in database and then retrieve using php, then it gets into ????? please help me as soon as possible...