Database characters messed up - сте човек? ОдговореÑ

[karpalak]

Hello. I've messed up everything few years back - not knowing that there is a potentional solution, I started everything from zero, even though I had crazy amount of topics and members. I found my old .sql so hopefully I can somehow restore it and use it as an archive because it possesses very valuable things.

I can't really remember what I was trying to do, I think I was converting the database to UTF-8 so I can upgrade to newer version of SMF.
I was using macedonian language pack (I think the UTF-8)...

I wish that someone can explain me how can I turn it back to normal, the .sql file is about 1GB.


This is how it looks now:


I have found one online decoder and I managed to bring it back to normal, so there has to be a way to fix it and this is how it should look:

[Doug Heffernan]

I can't really remember what I was trying to do, I think I was converting the database to UTF-8 so I can upgrade to newer version of SMF.

Have a look at this wiki page on how to do a proper/thorough utf-8 conversion. Hope it helps.

https://wiki.simplemachines.org/smf/UTF-8_Readme