Sorry to double post, but as you can see, my characters got screwed up
on this post.
Sounds like you need better tools. Which ones are you using? We'll not
recommend those.
For general "figuring out characters" tools, I've found
http://software.hixie.ch/utilities/cgi/unicode-decoder/utf8-decoder
fairly useful, though perhaps not for this purpose specifically.
--
Random Wisdom: Let a pizza fresh from the oven stand for several minutes
before cutting; it will reduce the amount of sauce running
out, and help prevent mouth burns.
I'm using mysql query browser. And I've tried doing it from the
command line via putty.
I did some looking around and couldn't find any indication as to why it
SHOULDN'T be working correctly, but maybe the tables aren't set up
correctly for the data involved. What charset are the tables created in?
If they've been created with latin1, for example, trying to stick koi8r
data into the tables would get broken on the way into the table and show
a lot of substitution characters, and if the charset is utf8, koi8r data
could be broken either going in or coming out of the table.
The intent, given everything being set up correctly, is that character
conversion becomes very smooth, reliable, and almost transparent. When
data are not labelled correctly, or charset are not properly assigned is
when things become difficult and programming becomes a struggle against
the database and data, and people end up wanting to do things like
"figure out how they are encoded in UTF-8" as you say above. That sounds
to my ear like the table is in perhaps latin1, your output mechanism
(perhaps a browser) is being told that it is utf8, and nothing is being
easy for you.
The usual place to start with understanding all of this from a MySQL
perspective is
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/charset.html
It's a quite good discussion of the topic in general, and (clearly) the
most important part of making everything work smoothly inside the
database.
--
100. Finally, to keep my subjects permanently locked in a mindless trance, I
will provide each of them with free unlimited Internet access.
--Peter Anspach's list of things to do as an Evil Overlord
Is your translation in putty also set up to use utf-8?