Correcting the imported latin1 data to be utf8 I restored my drupal site database from a backup but after i finished i discovered that the Imported data was symbols like this Ù‚ÙˆØ§Ù†ÙŠÙ† ÙƒØ±Ø© because the backup was taken using latin1 charset but my tables and database are utf8

I want a way to convert this data to utf8 so the are stored as letters and words in my database not symbols 

How can i do this ?
You can restore your database using this command

mysql -u someuser -p --default-character-set=utf8 somedatabase &lt; backup.sql


This overrides the default client character set.  

I would also make sure that my tables are also in utf8.  

So when you open up your backup file with a text editor, you should see utf8 as the DEFAULT CHARSET

CREATE TABLE `sometable` (
  `c1` varchar(10) NOT NULL
) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8


If you are still having problems, check your backup and make sure that the actual data being restored is correctly formatted.  If you had a character like é for example, it should show up as é when you view it in a text editor and not as &amp;eacute; or some unreadable symbol.

One additional note.  utf8_general_ci and latin1_swedish_ci are collations and not character sets.   Character sets like UTF8 can have multiple collations, some are case sensitive _cs and others are case insensitive _ci.  Collations set rules for character comparison and sorting.  

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collation