php - Can't get the right characters to display from the database

Question

I'm re-designing a Web site and I have a problem with the existing data base: The database collate is set to utf8_unicode_ci and in the table row I'm calling the collate seems to be set to latin1_swedish_ci the characters store in it are Japanese (but even in phpmyadmin) you see other characters (I guess because of the latin1_swedish_ci).

When I print the result from the query I get a bunch of ??? now using

    mysql_query('SET NAMES utf8');
 mysql_set_charset('utf8',$conn); 

Will output 2009a€N10?’???a€ 2009?N10???2009a€N11?’???a€ 2009?N11???

Any ideas?

Answer 1

Because the table was set to use latin1_swedish_ci, it was unable to correctly store the UTF-8 data that was entered. You need to switch that table to use utf8_unicode_ci for data going forward, but any existing data is essentially corrupted. You would have to re-enter the data after switching the collate to get the correct Japanese characters for the existing records.