I have an old shop using the Greek language that is working fine. I'm updating it to a newer shop but the Greek characters stored in the database are displaying as gibberish, like ôï ëåðôüôåñï. If I update the text in the database with actual Greek, then I can read it back the same. It is the existing text in the database that is not being converted.
The only difference I can see in the database is that the collation for the old database is utf8_general_ci. The collation for the new database is utf8_unicode_ci. I tried changing the collation of the new one to the old one using the command
ALTER DATABASE db_name COLLATE utf8_general_ci
It said it worked but when I checked the tables they had not changed. In searching for a fix to this problem. I don't know if that matters.
I found a post somewhere that said to run this command:
SHOW VARIABLES LIKE 'character_set_%';
I did that and it shows the character_set_server is set to latin, not utf and the post said that was the cause of the problem. But when I changed that, the characters of the old shop became gibberish so I had to remove it.
If I look at a file on the new site that has Greek characters stored in the file, it displays correctly. So this seems to be a problem with just reading existing data from the database.
I've tried many suggestions found on the web but none work. Does anyone know of a way to fix this or, at least, something to try?