I have had problems with encoding after export of tables (from hosting - via PhpMyAdmin) and import them to other machine (my notebook - via PhpMyAdmin too). In PhpMyAdmin the encoding of all data was shown correctly, not that good with the web pages (data pulled via php).
The first point is indication, that the data was imported correctly, but php script has got other character set than MySql is sending.
The script's character set is set in header: <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-2">. MySql setting was latin1.
Then following code helped me:
<?php
mysql_query("SET CHARACTER SET 'latin2'", $conn);
?>