mysql_query on utf8_general_ci collation - mysql

Question

I'm having some trouble with running a query on a database using utf8 encoding.
Everything works fine until I try a string with special characters.
I can't really make a lot of changes to the database since I'm adding some separate pages to an existing prestashop template.
This is my code (sorry, but some of it is in Romanian)
$acces_server=mysql_connect($db_host, $db_user, $db_pass);
if(!$acces_server) die ("Server-ul nu este disponibil momentan !");
mysql_set_charset('utf8');
echo mysql_client_encoding();
$acces_bd = mysql_select_db($db_name);
if (!$acces_bd) die ("Ne pare rau, dar baza de date nu poate fi accesata momentan !");
mysql_query('SET NAMES utf8') or die(mysql_error());
mysql_query('SET CHARACTER SET utf8') or die(mysql_error());
mysql_query('SET COLLATION_CONNECTION="utf8_general_ci" ') or die(mysql_error());
If I try to make a query like this I get 0 rows:
$experienta= $_GET['name'];
$rez=mysql_query("SELECT nume_cutie FROM rez_experiente WHERE nume = '".$experienta."'");
I've used echo to display the query and then typed it in phpMyAdmin and it worked .
Also the head section has this line :
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
I really don't know what else to do , all the solutions I've found so far don't seem to work. I have even tried using mysqli instead and the result was the same.
Please help me , and thank you for your time.
*Edit
I tried using stmt->prepare with mysqli and that didn't work.
I've also tried doing this :
$experienta2=str_replace("?","%",utf8_decode($experienta));
$rez=mysql_query("SELECT nume_cutie FROM rez_experiente WHERE nume LIKE '".$experienta2."'");
Wich turns this :
SELECT nume_cutie FROM rez_experiente WHERE nume LIKE '5th Avenue Beauty Center - Răsfăţ'
Into this:
SELECT nume_cutie FROM rez_experiente WHERE nume LIKE '5th Avenue Beauty Center - R%sf%%'
And again the query works in phpMyAdmin but mysql_query() returns nothing
I switched to utf8_unicode_ci and nothing changed.

Answer 1

After the database connection, run these queries:
SET character_set_client=utf8;
SET character_set_connection=utf8;
SET character_set_database=utf8;
SET character_set_results=utf8;
SET character_set_server=utf8;