Take the 2-minute tour ×  I have a MySQL database, which was
originally set up with the default latin1 character set and
latin1_swedish_ci collation. I was using the database like this
for sometime, until I noticed strange characters on my
production web site, which is powered by a database exported
from my development machine.  At this point, I changed the
default character set of the database and tables to utf8 and the
collation to utf8_unicode_ci, converted the latin1 data inside
each table to utf8 (using the 'convert data' option) and
exported the database as a single SQL file using HeidiSQL.  When
the resulting SQL file is opened in Notepad++, several
characters are rendered incorrectly. For example, en dashes (-)
are displayed as â€“ and e with accent (é) are displayed as Ã©.
I changed the encoding of the file from ANSI to UTF-8 (using the
encoding menu option in Notepad++) and the offending characters
are rendered correctly. I saved the new utf8-encoded SQL file
and attempted to import the contents in