This problem is really a pain in the backside if you forget about it, especially with a fully grown database.

Even if you set all your website's charsets to UTF-8 (file, header, html, tags) and selected the right collations (i.e. utf8_general_ci) and charset in your database, it still happens. And all because of MySQL's strange behaviour. It always expects it's received data to be latin1-charset.

If you know that, it's easy to prevent this behavior by simply putting the SET NAMES-command right behind your database connection. For PHP that would be:

<?php
$link = mysql_connect('localhost', 'mysql_user', 'mysql_password');
$db_selected = mysql_select_db('foo', $link);
mysql_query("SET NAMES 'utf8'"); // this is important, no INSERTs, UPDATES, etc before it
...

It's embarrassing, but it took me a while to get behind it and finally I had my PhpMyAdmin print out all the special characters correctly.

But again, I forgot and had to do some extra work, because what's expected to be utf8 is latin1 and you can't just switch collations. Nevertheless it's quite simple to clear the mess:

1. First of all backup the affected table(s) to be on the safe side!


2. Since MySQL expects the entered data to be latin1, set the collation for all the messy fields to i.e. latin1_general_ci


3. After saving, set the column type to BLOB. It should be a big enough binary storage form for our transfer. With this transformation the collation gets irrelevant and automatically cleared.


4. Last step: Set back both, the column type to what you had before (luckily you made your backup table to sneak a peek), and the collation (i.e. to utf8_general_ci).

Now when you look at your data you will see that all the special characters are displayed the right way.