Hi Javier,
The short answer is that I can't help you...I can only tell you what I did and maybe someone else will give a better reply so that I can learn something, too.
Javier Bezos wrote:
CREATE TABLE `wl_archive` ( `ar_namespace` int(11) NOT NULL default '0', `ar_title` varchar(255) character set latin1 collate latin1_bin NOT NULL default '', [...] ) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1;
and now they are like
SET @saved_cs_client = @@character_set_client; SET character_set_client = utf8; CREATE TABLE `wl_archive` ( `ar_namespace` int(11) NOT NULL default '0', `ar_title` varchar(255) character set latin1 collate latin1_bin NOT NULL default '', [...] ) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8; SET character_set_client = @saved_cs_client;
This is the exact problem that I had. I had a database with a mix of English and Japanese and could see everything fine. I then checked both the database and the system and found out they were both set to "latin1". If so, I don't know why it had worked for so long...
So, what I did was change the database and the MySQL system to utf8. But then the database also has to be converted and this failed miserably for me. I followed these steps:
http://en.gentoo-wiki.com/wiki/Convert_latin1_to_UTF-8_in_MySQL
which did not work (more specifically, the "Convert dump" step). In the end, I re-typed the Japanese (which wasn't a lot). So maybe you might have better luck or someone else can help you. Or maybe you can make some sense of the above link and succeed where I failed. :-)
Good luck...
Ray