Encoding problem with php-MySQL

Hi guys, Christ is risen! I have some problems with a php script which is supposed to send unicode text into a database. The most important problem is described in this projects title: An article's text is being first extracted from a site which is greek, but when it is stored in the database it becomes transliterated to some sort of extended latin. I have tried SET NAMES 'utf8' and SET CHARACTER SET 'utf8', but when I use that, almost all of the text gets truncated. I'm attaching the script. And here are some URLs that the script can use as input: [login to view URL] [login to view URL] [login to view URL] [login to view URL] [login to view URL] [login to view URL] [login to view URL] [login to view URL] [login to view URL] [login to view URL] [login to view URL] [login to view URL] Now there are three more things I would like to have from this project: 1) The article of the last link contains a photograph. Can the extraction page be used to also extract and store such photographs together with the article? 2) The source code of the original site contains a span tag with the property: class='headline'. Can the enclosed text be retrieved and stored in a new field of the database table as the title of the article? 3) The time-stamp does not need to be stored in the database. Thanks for looking.