How to use utf-8 encoding

[CapriSkye]

i've read in couple posts about how to use utf-8 encoding for their forums, and just thought somebody might be interested in how i changed mine to utf-8.
i don't know about other languages, but my board was in big5 encoding and changing to utf-8 would cause alot of problems. but these are the steps i took:

• backup database, either with phpmyadmin or smf's build in function
• open the sql file with an editor, then save as with utf-8 encoding
  big5 needs to have BOM turned off to work, so check to see if your language needs it
  both emeditor and ultraedit can do utf-8 conversion
  some converter will cause special characters to change, like html entity, make sure the one you're using isn't doing that
• after the file is saved in utf-8, check for special characters that cause problem in database, again depends on the language you're converting
• if everything looks ok, start importing the sql file using phpmyadmin
• if you get an error, it probably means that your converter has changed some characters during the conversion, try with another converter or you're screwed
• if you didn't get any error, go to your forum now and it will probably show weird characters, that means the language files you're using are not in utf-8. you'll have to convert every files in the language folder to utf-8.

that's pretty much all you have to do, hope this helps someone 

[coderski]

Thanks for an excellent advice!  I've just converted my db from ISO-8859-2 to UTF-8 with EmEditor.  Some things are just too easy - once you know how. 

_{smf 1.1.4}

[metallica48423]

you know that this is almost 2 years old now, and that SMF supports utf8 in the base install now, right?