PDO and UTF-8 Special characters in PHP / MySQL?
$dbhost = 'localhost';
$dbuser = 'root';
$dbpass = '';
$con = mysql_connect("localhost","root","");
mysql_set_charset('utf8');
if (!$con)
  {
  die('Could not connect: ' . mysql_error());
  }

mysql_select_db("kdict", $con);
$sql  = "SELECT * FROM `en-kh` where english='a'";
echo $sql;
$result = mysql_query($sql);

while($row = mysql_fetch_array($result))
  {
  echo $row['english'] . " </br> " . $row['khmer'];
  echo "<br />";
  }
  ?>

class crud {
    //code..
    public function conn()
            {
                isset($this->username);
                isset($this->password);
                if (!$this->db instanceof PDO)
                {
                    $this->db = new PDO($this->dsn, $this->username, $this->password);
                    $this->db->setAttribute(PDO::ATTR_ERRMODE, PDO::ERRMODE_EXCEPTION);
                     $this->db->setAttribute(PDO::MYSQL_ATTR_INIT_COMMAND, "SET NAMES 'utf8'");

                }
            }
     /*more code here*/
   }



/*** a new crud object ***/
$crud = new crud();
/*** The DSN ***/
$crud->dsn = "mysql:dbname=kdict;host=localhost";

/*** MySQL username and password ***/
$crud->username = 'root';
$crud->password = '';
/*** select all records from table ***/
$records = $crud->rawSelect("SELECT * FROM `en-kh` where english='a'");

/*** fetch only associative array of values ***/
$rows = $records->fetchAll(PDO::FETCH_ASSOC);

/*** display the records ***/
 foreach($rows as $row)
{
        foreach($row as $fieldname=>$value)
        {
            echo $fieldname.' = '.$value.'<br />';
        }
        echo '<hr />';
}
  ?>

$this->setAttribute(PDO::MYSQL_ATTR_INIT_COMMAND, "SET NAMES 'utf8'");

$this->db = new PDO($this->dsn, $this->username, $this->password, array(PDO::MYSQL_ATTR_INIT_COMMAND => "SET NAMES 'utf8'"));

$this->db = new PDO($this->dsn, $this->username, $this->password);
$this->db->exec("SET NAMES 'utf8';");