UTF8 Conversion

[Rick5150]

My site has been converted to v1.5.1 from 1.3.9h and is showing some odd characters. DrByte recommended this thread as a fix.

http://www.zen-cart.com/content.php?...8859-1-to-utf8

My question is that while this is good information (great information, actually), shouldn't I be moving forward with the new character set? I have read so many articles, and none seem to offer the solution I need. I have seen people revert back to the latin character set, and other have altered the character set in the database to mixed results - and many warnings.

1) In a perfect world, what should the database setting be for v1.5.1? I expect UTF8 and if that is the case...
2) Is there a way to convert it? Even manually changing 100 or so files to UTF8 is fine with me.
3) Will that corrupt existing data? Of course, I will back everything up first.

As it is now, I can delete the offending characters. Some are dashes, some are ampersands, and some are foreign characters from customers names and I have no idea what to call them. Simply re-entering them solves the problem, but since my database is not in UTF8 is this just a band aid?

Is there a safe script that can do this for me?

Sorry for all the questions, but I am almost done the conversion to v1.5.1 and there are only a few things left to deal with.

[DML73]

Im in same situation. Just upgraded from 1.3.8a to 1.5.1. (old DB and new cart files). About half of the DB tables are latin the other half utf8 (I don't know how that happened). Site is in english only but I have many international customers, so I would like to change from latin to utf8. There are lots of threads discussing how to do this but none of them seems to mention a safe way to do it. Can this not be done safely? Step by step instructions would be great.