Messed up the encoding

Question

Hello I did a mistake by setting UTF8 on a website that was on ISO, the data came in the database like this �����2012年4�19��(���) Is there any solution to get the meaning of this sentence? it it Chinese characters normally.

Thank you.

Answer 1

You can try changing encoding to binary, and then to iso (but do make a backup)

ALTER TABLE `yourtablename` CHANGE `fieldname` `fieldname` TEXT CHARACTER SET BINARY NULL ; 
ALTER TABLE `yourtablename` CHANGE `fieldname` `fieldname` TEXT CHARACTER SET latin1 NULL ;

or to utf..

ALTER TABLE `yourtablename` CHANGE `fieldname` `fieldname` TEXT CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_bin NULL ;