The trick is to tell mysql TWO charsets, the source and the destination.
Read about the 3 settings here:
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/charset-connection.html
Without dumping, this might work simpler:
ALTER TABLE tbl_name CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET utf8;
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/alter-table.html
Other things to watch out for:
http://forums.mysql.com/read.php?103,321568 (Storing Hebrew strings Ok, but gibberish when pulling data on another server)
http://forums.mysql.com/read.php?26,297220 (Require suggestion for changing character set in Master master replication setup)
http://forums.mysql.com/read.php?10,288177 (UTF-8 problem)
http://forums.mysql.com/read.php?103,285717 (what is the step to convert a db from latin1 to UTF8)
http://forums.mysql.com/read.php?10,254886 (Character encodings issues with php, mysql, apache)
http://forums.mysql.com/read.php?10,255039 (load data character set question)
http://forums.mysql.com/read.php?103,253747 (Storing UTF-8 strings in MySQL Database)
http://forums.mysql.com/read.php?103,246778 (utf8 inputs store as html entities, how to retrievesubstr of utf8 inputs?)
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/13/2010 01:34PM by Rick James.