While working on web development projects I often need to copy the contents of one database to another. Consequently I’ve seen the problem described on Alex Kings’s blog a few times, and been able to deal with it using the technique he suggests.

Today however I saw the same symptoms - apostrophes and some other characters translated to weird glyphs in a database that had been saved and restored apparently using UTF-8 coding throughout. How can that happen, I wondered?

See how to correct weird characters in MySQL databases...