How is this website fixing the encoding?

Question

I am trying to turn this text:

×וויר. העתיד של רשתות חברתיות והתקשורת ×©×œ× ×•

Into this text:

Answer 1

Since the issue was a MySQL fault with double-encoded UTF8 strings, MySQL is the right way to solve it.

Running the following commands will solve it -

• mysqldump $DB_NAME -u $DB_USER -p -h $DB_HOST.EXAMPLE.NET --add-drop-table --default-character-set=latin1 > export.sql - latin1 is used here to force MySQL not to split the characters, and should not be used otherwise.
• cp export{,.utf8}.sql - making a backup copy.
• sed -i -e 's/latin1/utf8/g' export.utf8.sql - Replacing the latin1 with utf8 in the file, in order to import it as UTF-8 instead of 8859-1.
• mysql $DB_NAME -u $DB_USER -p -h $DB_HOST.EXAMPLE.NET < export.utf8.sql - import everything back to the database.

This will solve the issue in about ten minutes.