Help understanding Character Sets for PHP and phpMyAdmin

[steveboj]

I'm working on a new PHP + MySQL site which uses data from a FileMaker Pro database, and I'm hoping someone can help me understand how I should organise the character sets to properly deal with 'non-standard' characters.

 

My client uses a FileMaker database, which they export as 'CSV' and then import into phpMyAdmin.

 

My confusion started when I tried to convert the non-standard characters to their HTML equivalents, e.g. convert a GB Pound sign to £ or £

I couldn't work out how to use PHP to convert those characters when the data was being exported out of FileMaker as "Windows (ANSI)". So I tried exporting from FileMaker as "Unicode (UTF-".

 

Exporting as UTF-8 does seem to work, but my data now appears scrambled when I view it in phpMyAdmin. So I'm wondering if I need to change the character set of the MySQL database somehow?

On the phpMyAdmin home page I can see a drop-down menu of character sets for "Language", but I'm a bit scared of changing that in case it messes up any of my other databases...

 

So my head is spinning at the moment and I'm hoping someone can help me understand what the issues are here and how I should deal with the character sets.

 

Thanks in advance!

 

Steve