Detecting utf8 broken characters in MySQL

Question

I\'ve got a database with a bunch of broken utf8 characters scattered across several tables. The list of characters isn\'t very extensive AFAIK (áéíúóÁÉÍÓÚÑñ)

Fixing

Answer 1

You might have rows with properly encoded UTF8 and with wrongly encoded characters. In this case "CONVERT(BINARY CONVERT(post_title USING latin1) USING utf8)" will trim some fields.

I ended up doing it this way

update `table` set `name` = replace(`name` ,CONVERT(BINARY "ä" USING latin1),'ä');
update `table` set `name` = replace(`name` ,CONVERT(BINARY "ö" USING latin1),'ö');
update `table` set `name` = replace(`name` ,CONVERT(BINARY "ü" USING latin1),'ü');
update `table` set `name` = replace(`name` ,CONVERT(BINARY "Ä" USING latin1),'Ä');
update `table` set `name` = replace(`name` ,CONVERT(BINARY "Ö" USING latin1),'Ö');
update `table` set `name` = replace(`name` ,CONVERT(BINARY "Ü" USING latin1),'Ü');
update `table` set `name` = replace(`name` ,CONVERT(BINARY "ß" USING latin1),'ß');