Converting Composite Bytes to Unicode in MySQL

Question

I have a MySQL database that I recently migrated to another server. Unfortunately, MySQL dumps its data in Latin1 with any UTF-8 characters represented by composite bytes (ex. – instead of —).

Is it possible to run a simple query or script that would convert these composite bytes to UTF-8 within my tables? It's impossible to do it row by row because there are hundreds of thousands of rows.

Answer 1

see http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2007/12/18/fixing-column-encoding-mess-in-mysql/