Database corrupted when exported

When I export mySQL database in phpMyAdmin, certain characters are corrupted in the text file that is created. For example, the danish characters å,ø,æ are saved out as Ø, ø, Æ

Other characters like ½ and ™ are displayed like ½ and ™.

It has been like this from the beginning and it requires me to go in and find/replace each of these bizarro characters with the real ones. But, I'd love to figure out why this is happening and solve the problem.

I'm using latin1_danish_ci collation and 'da_DK.ISO_8859-1' and 'en_US.ISO_8859-1' in the language defines.

Does anyone have any ideas?

Hmm. Lots of character set problems today. I think the data is probably fine, but whatever you're using to display the data isn't picking up the encoding of your export file. In other words, character encodings use the same byte sequences to display different things, so if you make sure that your export is really an extended ISO-8859-1 and your display is the same encoding, everything should display correctly. You might address this problem by using Unicode (UTF-8).

You should be able to use iconv to convert between character sets, so that might save you the extra work if you don't want to find the source of the problem.

http://www.gnu.org/software/libiconv/

Try the collation settings for utf8_danish_ci.
Might work for you