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+1  Q: 

Finding special characters in MySQL database

Does anyone know of a quick and easy way to locate special characters that didn't get correctly converted when data was imported into MySQL.

I think this an issue due to data encoding (e.g. Latin-1 vs. UTF-8). Regardless where the issue first occurred, I'm stuck with junk in my data that I need to remove.

A: 

There's unlikely to be an easy function for this, because for example, a broken UTF-8 special character will consist of two valid ISO-8859-1 characters. So while there are patterns of what those broken characters look like, there is no sure-fire way of identifying them.

You could build a search+replace function to replace the most common occurrences in your language (e.g. Ãœ for Ü if imported from UTF-8 into ISO-8859-1).

That said, it would be best to restart the import with the correct settings, if at all possible.

Pekka  2010-07-29 18:40:33
Unfortunately reimporting the data at this point isn't really an option. And there aren't many of these special characters sprinkled throughout the data. But even writing a search-n-replace script, you need to have a starting list of special characters to replace. That's the list I'm trying to create.
gurun8  2010-07-29 18:52:22

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