… set the encoding, some of the rows were actually in UTF-8. That needed to be fixed. Simply using CONVERT(column USING xxx) did not work because MySQL treated the source data as if it… to fix notorious KOI8-R vs CP1251 encoding issues in Russian, and other national SBCS encoding vs UTF-8 issues, I suppose…

…. MyISAM tables with latin1 encoding. Tried: ALTER TABLE CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET utf8; Does nothing except changes table/column encodings, but no actual content changes. So.. After this mysql thinks…

…: 1) if the encoding itself is OK for the whole table, but MySQL thinks there’s some other encoding, use CHANGE COLUMN to binary and back to proper encoding. (This is the….) 2) if the encoding itself is not OK, or if you only need to fix several rows, use CONVERT() tricks. (This is…

… MySQL performs a “utf8 -> latin1″ conversion. In order to fix the encoding I need to treat this “latin1″ data as binary, then convert it to utf8. And so here is the statement I need: UPDATE table SET col = convert(CONVERT(CONVERT(col USING latin1…

… text. Ideally, MySQL would have a UUID column type to store the values as binary rather than strings but convert to string…. The ability to insert an ID in hex text and convert it to binary would be a must too. That’s… to convert to binary and hex at any time. Later, as I thought more of the problem, I realized the Base64 encoding…

… MyISAM – it came out of Sql Server into MySQL, and may have been converted to utf-8 during that first import. I…, I have found nothing that tells me what character set encoding that is, and I’ve tried many. When it was…-8 or ISO-8859-1), though if I display it converted to utf-8, it’s back to upside-down exclamation…