Displaying UTF8 characters from mysql using bash

I was working on a bash script that was using mysql to retrieve utf8 encoded names from a table.
Everything was smooth till i used some non English chars, like Greek and Brazilian and then i started seen a bunch of ? printed instead of the characters i was expecting.
I spend a morning looking around for a solution as i though that this was a BASH issue.
No matter what i tried the result was the same.
Then i added one more switch to the mysql query i was doing, to force mysql to output the result in utf-8, in case it was not doing so (which i was *sure* it was, as the tables were in utf-8 encoding.)

--default-character-set=utf8

After adding this all my problems were solved...

Mental note : Make sure, that when i am "sure" about something, always test it, just to be sure it works as "expected".