é being converted from database to site
You need to ask the database from another angle. Please run this:

SHOW CREATE DATABASE mydb;


This will tell you what it sees. If you want to change the Character set and.or collation, do this:

ALTER DATABASE mydb ... ;


In mysql, ALTER DATABASE can change character set and/or collation. I have mentioned this in my past posts in the DBA StackExchange :


Dec 04, 2012 : Why default character_set_server is latin1?
Sep 18, 2012 : change encoding of database from latin1_swedish_ci to utf8
Sep 26, 2011 : How do I configure MySQL &#39;5.1.49-1ubuntu8&#39; to show multibyte characters?
Sep 19, 2011 : How to convert mysql database charset to utf-8