PUBLIC MARKS from hobbes with tag utf-8

So, I keep having all sorts of problems when moving my mysql database from one machine to another. The issue is that in text or varchar columns containing data that have special characters like smart quotes (those crazy curly quotes), accented letters, etc. result in scrambled data. For example the following phrase

Character encoding and character sets, in truth, are not that difficult to understand. But if you don't understand them, you are going to be caught by surprise by some of HTML Purifier's behavior, namely the fact that it operates UTF-8 or the limitations of the character encoding transformations it does. This document will walk you through determining the encoding of your system and how you should handle this information. It will stay away from excessive discussion on the internals of character encoding.