I have characters like these on our web site: Fémnyomó
That is a street address, entered in another language (though I do not know which). Here's the db setup:
mysql 4.1.2log
charset cp1252 West European (latin1)
I'm using PHP but without mbstrings() (though I do no string conversions on this address, just echo).
If I changed the mysql charset from cp1252 to UTF-8 and made sure I used things like header( 'Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8' );
would that improve my situation? Or, is the data hosed because it was saved in the cp1252 charset and there is nothing I can do? The original database was created in 2002 and has been used/expanded since. We've upgraded servers and re-imported dumps but ashamedly I admit to not giving charsets much thought.
If I'm hosed, I'll probably just remove the text in those fields but I'd like to support unicode going forward, so if I issue ALTER database_name DEFAULT CHARACTER SET utf8;
will that make sure future multibyte encodings are saved correctly, taking at least storage out of the equation (leaving me to worry about PHP)?
Thanks -