MySQL data contains chinese charactor become äöüßæåéé

It took me hours figuring this.

All my mysql data became symbols.

Then finally, i found the culprit.

1st, i converted my field and default charset of my table to unicode.

But i did not update the existing data to unicode. So it was my mistake.

2nd, in php, i changed my mysql_set_charset("UTF-8");

So now all the data from the table which contains original latin will be forced to utf-8.

So the symbol appear in my html output, so does phpmyadmin.

To fix this, i wrote a program to retrieve the data from latin charset, and

then output it as a code in array to replace the data later back to the database as utf-8.

Example:

mysql_set_charset("latin1", $conndb);

mysql_query("select ...");

$aData = mysql_fetch_assoc($query);

mysql_set_charset("utf-8", $conndb);

$aData["fieldname"] = utf8_encode($aData["fieldname"]);

//then update those record with newly encoded utf8

mysql_query("update table ... ");

so, the next time we query the database, ensure to use

mysql_set_charset("utf-8", $conndb);