Multiple Charsets Issue

Question

I've tried a few things such as str replace, changing the charset etc but I can't get anything to work properly.

Problem Items have been uploaded to the database with no charset. I've now added the charset to make sure this doesn't happen again. Now I need to fix the items that are in the database. I'm finding it difficult because sometimes they're uploaded on a MAC, other times Windows so there's a couple of charsets in there meaning I'm struggling with the strreplace.

Here are a couple of entries with no charset to make it clear:

1. “This new development will not only offer a range of private and affordable housing but with the extensive commercial offerings including a family pub and restaurant and community centre, we are also creating an exemplary development which will bring long-lasting benefits to the wider community.â€

2. “Everyone was so friendly and it was heartening to see so much interest in the art of baking.”

3. Looking at this brand new ‘model’ Cascada makes me think of other ‘super models’ like Kate Moss and Heidi Klum.

The same items if I add the UTF-8 charset:

1. “This new development will not only offer a range of private and affordable housing but with the extensive commercial offerings including a family pub and restaurant and community centre, we are also creating an exemplary development which will bring long-lasting benefits to the wider community.”

2. �Everyone was so friendly and it was heartening to see so much interest in the art of baking.�

3. Looking at this brand new ‘model’ Cascada makes me think of other ‘super models’ like Kate Moss and Heidi Klum.

I know that I'm going to need to edit every entry in the database. But everything I've tried so far outputs a special character in one way or another.

Please help!

Thanks

Answer 1

Quite embarrassing but I managed to fix this in PHPMYADMIN. It turned out the field names were set to latin1_swedish_ci so I changed this to utf8_bin and it appears to have fixed the problem.