I have had many fights with funny characters (on http://fr.chainki.org). I generally find SQLyog slightly better at these things than phpmyadmin; it is a less well known tool, but also free, and I tend to use both tools depending on what I am doing.
One other thing I do is have among my tests, a little function which I run as part of my test-suite to check if the db is set up correctly:
/** * Test AltLang wiki lang code conversion */ function testGetWikiLangCodeFromDmozLangName() { $altLang = new AltLang();
assert("en" == $altLang->getWikiLangCodeFromDmozLangName("English")); assert("cs" == $altLang->getWikiLangCodeFromDmozLangName(urldecode("%c4%8cesky"))); assert("ca" == $altLang->getWikiLangCodeFromDmozLangName(urldecode("Catal%c3%a0"))); // assert("fr" == $altLang->getWikiLangCodeFromDmozLangName("Français")); }
It doesn't answer your question I know, but I hope it will be of help anyway.