Tried a REPLACE on test data in MySQL: SET field = REPLACE(field, ‘•’, ‘•’);
MySQL said it happily replaced the string in lots of fields (and searching that string returns no rows), but when viewing in a browser, they’re still there.

I tried (with a backup, of course) changing the column to binary, then latin-1, then back to utf-8 and the data looks exactly the same: ¡§de-mystify¡¨ (That’s a word with what I believe to be MS Word curly-quotes around it, but they’re coming out as upside-down apostrophe followed by, respectively, the “section” glyph and an umlaut. In the db, I see ¡§ for the first one, after the conversion (addition of Capital A with Circumflex). On a web page (utf-8 in header and content-type meta tag), it is as above.

Searching everywhere, I have found nothing that tells me what character set encoding that is, and I’ve tried many. When it was sensed (by PHP) as ISO-8859-1, it prints as “��” (two black-diamond question marks, whether the web page showing it is in utf-8 or ISO-8859-1), though if I display it converted to utf-8, it’s back to upside-down exclamation marks and “section” glyphs, etc. And some characters look like „« (double-comma, double-left-angle-brackets), or this (in my Navicat view): „X .

I’m sadly guessing that there is no solution for this within MySQL. Does anybody have information to share?

> UPDATE table SET column=CONVERT(CONVERT(column USING binary) USING utf8) WHERE id=123;

Also, I’m just not able to do this thing on my own. Anyone can help me convert my data for a fee? Please contact me at sanbat[@t]gmail.com

You can test it out on any old database you have if you wish before doing it ”live”