Page 2 - Phpmyadmin dipslays greek in a weird encoding

Thought so. Something is decoding and thinking the result is UTF-8 (it's probably ISO 8859-1/Latin1), and it gets displayed using question marks (because the Latin1 stuff isn't valid UTF-8 stuff).

That decoding is somewhere. It doesn't look like it's the database so far...
When the Python script goes to get data and display it, immediately before the SELECT do a

query. Does that change anything?

Yes it does!

i entered manully greek stuff into the fdatabase via phomyadmin
and when i executed set names utf8 before the retriveing then i no longer see ???? but instead i see proper greek letters!

But when i enter greek letters trrough my php script they no longer appear correctly when retrieved neither in phpmyadmin as well.

So it is the database.

With your Python try adding a charset=utf8 to the constructor (instead of a SET NAMES).


How does the PHP script connect?

whta you gave me produce errors, but the following does work properly!