I happened to have my backup sql file which contains Unicode characters broken. This happened when I had just bought a new version of Mamp Pro to install in my Mac. It comes with the latest PHP and a lot of exiting features!
I then re-installed my database of one project that contains Unicode characters. Unfortunately, it shows strange characters like below:
It’s a double converted character. To fix it, simply:
- Convert back to latin1
- Convert to binary
- Convert to utf8
So, go to the SQL tab of the phpMyAdmin, and run the following command:
alter table table_name modify field_name VARCHAR(2000) character set latin1;
alter table table_name modify field_name blob;
alter table table_name modify field_name VARCHAR(2000) character set utf8;
Then the unicode character will be back.