Re: problems with charset

[Rick James]

SET NAMES controls what the application claims the bytes are encoded as.
Your table says the name and value are encoded in the database as latin2.
If you have done SET NAMES utf8, then bytes will be converted between utf8 and latin2 during INSERTs (utf8->latin2) and SELECTs (latin2->utf8).

A typical problem is that the _bytes_ in your application do not match what you do in SET NAMES. This leads to garbage in the table, which may or may not lead to troubles. (Sometimes, the garbage that is INSERTed is undone on SELECT, thereby masking the mess.)

Do this at essentially the same place where you are doing INSERTs/SELECTs:
SHOW VARIABLES LIKE 'character%';
That may give us another clue.