Earlier this summer I moved my company’s website to a new server and upgraded all of the software to the latest versions. The upgrade when remarkably smoothly except for one issue with the character encodings on the website. My company’s web site contains a great deal of bilingual content in English and Français and all of the accented french characters (ç á í ó ú) were displaying garbled iso8859-1 encoded strings of multibyte characters: � instead of é forinstance.

Upgrading from mysql 4.0 to 4.1 had put my database into utf-8 mode so I either had to figure out how to convert the database to back to latin1 or bite the bullet and go utf-8 across the entire website.