From MySQL docs: A character set is a set of symbols and encodings. A collation is a set of rules for comparing characters in a character set. Let’s make the distinction clear with an example of an imaginary character set. Suppose that we have an alphabet with four letters: ‘A’, ‘B’, ‘a’, ‘b’. We give … Read more
Stand-alone utility approach iconv -f ISO-8859-1 -t UTF-8 in.txt > out.txt -f ENCODING the encoding of the input -t ENCODING the encoding of the output You don’t have to specify either of these arguments. They will default to your current locale, which is usually UTF-8.
For those people still arriving at this question in 2020 or later, there are newer options that may be better than both of these. For example, utf8_unicode_520_ci. All these collations are for the UTF-8 character encoding. The differences are in how text is sorted and compared. _unicode_ci and _general_ci are two different sets of rules … Read more