I guess the strings are stored in latin1 encoding, but you are using utf8 as charset for the database.
English text is based on ASCII and ASCII maps directly to latan1 and utf8.
Try to switch your encoding of the database to latin1. Do this only with a backup.
The other way could be to load all strings from the database decode them with latin1 (the original encoding), encode them to utf8 and write back to the database. Maybe you can do this with a mysqldump.
It's better when everything is right in your database, instead working around on application level.
I am not very familiar with mysql databases. In the past latin1 was the default standard setting.
The switch to utf8 was hard and many had issues with this. I guess if you google for 'mysql latin1 broken', you'll get many results.
English text is based on ASCII and ASCII maps directly to latan1 and utf8.
Try to switch your encoding of the database to latin1. Do this only with a backup.
The other way could be to load all strings from the database decode them with latin1 (the original encoding), encode them to utf8 and write back to the database. Maybe you can do this with a mysqldump.
It's better when everything is right in your database, instead working around on application level.
I am not very familiar with mysql databases. In the past latin1 was the default standard setting.
The switch to utf8 was hard and many had issues with this. I guess if you google for 'mysql latin1 broken', you'll get many results.
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All humans together. We don't need politicians!
All humans together. We don't need politicians!