Question about Double Encoding

[Shu Chow]

Hi, all. I was lucky to find Rick James' post on double encoding. I believe that is the exact problem I'm having. My tables are in UTF8, but the relevant system variables are all in latin1. I'm getting the same symptoms described. I do have two questions, though.

First, I don't full understand how the characters are being translated from latin1 to utf8. Specifically, how:

⚈ latin1 E1 = utf8 C3A1
⚈ latin1 83 = utf8 C692
⚈ latin1 A1 = utf8 C2A1

The first and last ones are correct (a with accent and inverted exclamation, respectively). In UTF8, c6 92 is a "small f with hook" while in latin, 83 is a capital S.

Second, in diagnosing this problem, when we looked at the selected columns through the MySQL command line client, the characters actually looked correct. When we set set names utf8, it then appeared garbled. How was the client able to correctly interpret it?

Thanks for any insight.