I have a PHP web app with MySQL tables taking utf8 text. I recently converted the data from latin1 to utf8 along with the tables and columns accordingly. I did, however, forget to use mysql_set_charset and the latest incoming data I would assume came through the MySQL connection as latin1. I don’t know what happens when latin1 comes in to a utf8 column, but it’s causing some strange display issues for items like comma, quotes, ampersand, etc.
Now that mysql_set_charset is in place, it is pulling the data out with funky characters. Any way to convert the latin1-utf8 soup to straight utf8 now that i have the database connection resource using the correct charset?
Found the fix with your comment. Here was the SQL line that seemingly has solved my issue.
Even though the column is UTF8, it forces it to pull the data out as latin1, convert to binary, convert to utf8 and re-insert.