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I’ve run into a couple problems converting MySQL data to UTF-8. With Moodle for example, version 1.7 defaults to specify UTF-8 in the HTML header, which makes all non-unicode text look funny. Moodle’s automated database conversion only works if you have certain versions of php. I didn’t, so here is how I switched a Moodle MySQL database to UTF-8.Dump the database to an .sql file, then convert the file to unicode (UTF-8). Unifier is very small and free to use for 30 file conversions. It did the conversion very easily.

Just uncheck all the conversion options except “Convert HTML entities to raw Unicode characters”, and run the conversion to save as a different file. Then batch re-import the data to a different database set up for UTF-8 using the .sql file.

Here is a good discussion on how to convert ISO encoded mysql databases to UTF.