funkathustra

Great! That makes a lot of sense. Just so others who may be reading this have a bit more direction, I exported the entire table to an SQL script, I opened it in a text editor that supports conversion and such. I converted it to Latin1, and then assigned it UTF-8 encoding. Saved it. Imported it. Bam! Worked like a charm. Thanks for the suggestion!

I would recommend reducing your double-query + PHP processing to a single query: $update = mysql_query("UPDATE users SET count = count+1 WHERE user_id='$user'"); And, for God's sake, never use a SELECT * if you're not going to work with ALL the columns. It's inefficient.

I just realized that although my page was being rendered using UTF-8, and my database tables are all utf8_general_ci, my PHP mysql connection was the default latin1... so all the data being stored in the database isn't really in the right format. Everything looks fine (since everything is going in Latin1 and is being pulled out at Latin1, but I want to fix it before the client starts dumping even more data into the tables. I already figured out that I have to run a set names query in my PHP to get it to go into UTF-8... and any NEW data I put in the database will be stored correctly after that. However, how do I convert the existing Latin1 data that's (mis)stored in a UTF8 database to UTF8 data? I would think this would be a common problem (since many people are using UTF-8 in the charsets and UTF-8-based collations these days), but I haven't found a good answer. Thanks for the help!