Re: Weird problem with charsets

[Rick James]

This is a groß problem...

Immediately after connecting to mysql, do
SET NAME utf8;
This says that the bytes your client sends to the server are utf8 bytes. Then they will be converted to the column type of utf8; that is, they won't need to be changed.

What probably happened is that your PHP code defaulted to latin1 (or something), but really had utf8 bytes in the strings. Then the allegedly-latin1 bytes got converted to utf8, leading to the mess.

Sorry, but the data you already have in the tables is messed up. It may be possible to fix it if you are desperate.

You should never need utf8_decode().

For further analysis,
SELECT length(x), char_length(x), hex(x) FROM table;
where x is the field containing the mangled version of 'die welt ist groß und größer' (or some other suitably short string).