in reply to Reading russian characters
Also, find a way to look at (say in hexadecimal) what the actual bytes are, that are being rendered as "????" on output. (How are you generating that output? To the console; a web page?) Question-marks probably just mean a display-only issue: the bytes are there, and correct, but the system doesn't know what charset to use to display them. Could be that they're not there, though; that they've been corrupted earlier. Only one way to know for sure.
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