Everything "looks" fine until you try to extract substrings in some way. That's because without decoding your data on input the strings are handled as sequences of bytes, so a character like ä translates to two bytes.

Now if you extract some part of string and didn't decoded it first, you can accidentally rip apart these two bytes, leaving behind encoding garbage - usually not a good idea.

So I recommend to properly decode UTF-8 (and other character encodings) during input, and encode the strings on output. And use utf8; if you have string constants in your source code.