Accent truncating query even though everything is unicode/UTF?

Works fine via phpMyAdmin though truncates through PHP.

[JAB Creations]

Letters with accents are truncating values made when my site executes an INSERT query. The collation for the database, the tables, and any and all application columns are all utf8_general_ci. I also execute the following queries each time I open a MySQL connection...

SET CHARACTER SET 'utf8'
SET NAMES 'utf8'

When I execute the exact same INSERT query via phpMyAdmin however the accent does not cause truncation. Thoughts please?

- John

[JAB Creations]

It turns out that using the queries above are necessary for getting Unicode characters though is destructive to posting them. A simple if statement cleared the issue up and all 28 languages on my site are correctly working. :)

- John