Store and retrieve Unicode characters with MySQL using PHP

Following points need to configure for Store and retrieve Unicode characters with MySQL using PHP. 

In HTML checks:
1. Header Part: <meta charset="utf-8">

MySQL Checks:
2. Your database encoding/collation should be utf8_general_ci.

PHP MySQL Checks:
3. Script to insert Unicode text to table: use the following query before you fetching the records from DB

<?php
@mysql_query("SET NAMES 'utf8'",$conn);/// Did the trick to display or insert unicode characters in db
$qry= "INSERT INTO `tbl_name` (`field_name`) values ('".$values."')" ;
$exe = @mysql_query($qry,$conn);
?>

4. PHP code to Display the Unicode text from MySQL database:
<?php
@mysql_query("SET NAMES 'utf8'",$conn); /// Did the trick to display or insert unicode characters in db
 $result = @mysql_query("SELECT * FROM `tbl_name`",$conn);
?>


While on DB connection(optional) ie., collation not set as utf8_general_ci: 

$con = mysqli_connect("localhost","root",""); if (!$con) { die('Could not connect: ' . mysql_error()); }

mysqli_query('SET character_set_results=utf8');
mysqli_query('SET names=utf8');
mysqli_query('SET character_set_client=utf8');
mysqli_query('SET character_set_connection=utf8');
mysqli_query('SET character_set_results=utf8');
mysqli_query('SET collation_connection=utf8_general_ci');

mysqli_select_db('onlinetest',$con);

{/}

Code