I did not set my DB connection to use charset utf8 before so the text Langeland, Tåsinge, Ærø, Avernakø, Strynø is saved as Langeland, TÃ¥singe, Ærø, Avernakø, Strynø in db, but displays fine in my pages. Now that I have set the charset to utf8, how can I convert the encoding of all the existing entries so that strings will be saved as is, without encoding/decoding?
i dont think its possible. My repect to the person find out how to fix it. You could try to google broken utf8 character map or somethign and evetually regex all the records but i doubt very much it is possible
The data is physically saved as is, i.e. in a wrong encoding. You'd need to run some script to traverse through entire database and to do the conversion.
Or export entire database and re-import it with mysql tools such as: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/17049903/converting-mysql-table-with-incorrectly-encoded-data-to-utf-8
What @stamster said! You basically have to re-create your dataset....