I've been working on trying to solve this problem for hours... nothing seems to work!
We have an MS Excel spreadsheet from a client with tens of thousands of cells imported into a MySQL database. As one would expect the Excel sheet has a lot of characters in it that don't get converted to the standard latin character sets very well.
What I get is a lot of extra characters around things like fractions, degree signs, bullet points, etc - most the letter A with a cap on it, but any time I try to do a str_replace() on it, nothing happens - the extra characters are still there. For example, if I try to replace the capped A with a fraction after it with the equivalent HTML character code, I just get a capped A with the html equivalent after it (looks exactly the same).
I imagine what we should have done is create the original DB in CP1252, done the import, then go through and convert all the tables to Latin1, but we're kinda beyond that at this point in the game.
Any ideas of what we can do from this point on are greatly appreciated!
Excel is CP1252
DB is Latin 1
Page Display is ISO-8859-1
Thanks!
Cameron
