[thelist] character encoding nightmare

[Garth Hagerman]

Hello-
Is The List still alive?
I’ve got a problem which would probably be simple to solve if I knew more about character encoding, but, since I don’t, I’ve been flailing wildly and wasting a lot of time.
I’ll give you the short version. If somebody replies, I can supply further details.
I’ve got two MySQL databases running on different hosts. I’ve written a series of scripts which keep certain tables and fields synced between them.
The basic mechanics of this work fine, but certain characters turn to gibberish on the second site. The exact same html enity-ized strings are being inserted into both DBs, but apostrophes, etc. turn to gibberish on the second site.
Originally, I had everything with the sites’ pages using iso-8859-1encoding and the DBs set for Latin-Swedish collation. As I read about encoding problems, it was suggested I convert to UTF-8. That makes things worse.
I really don’t know what to try.

  thanks in advance
 Garth