MYSQL dump and problems character encoding I have a 2 gb old database sql backup file. The problem is that text is encoded in UTF-8. Actually this isnt the real problem. This database contains greek and english characters. 

The problem is that for example greek Π letter is encoded as
C3 90 UTF-8  which is unicode U+00D0 , clearly not Π letter. But in ISO-8859-7 D0 is Π!

This occurs almost everywhere.. Is there a fix i can apply ?Ideally i want to convert it to utf-8..

NOTICE
ISO8859-7 was used
Assuming your source data contained only English and Greek characters, and was mis-exported with an ISO-8859-1 to UTF-8 conversion (rather than an ISO-8859-7 to UTF-8 conversion), you can get your data back by first repeating the missed conversion the other way around, and then doing the right one.

You could use iconv for this (available on pretty much all Linux distributions, and on Windows via gnuwin32).

You'd do something like:

$ iconv -f UTF-8 -t ISO-8859-1 &lt; bad_dump_file.sql | \
  iconv -f ISO-8859-7 -t UTF-8 &gt; good_dump_file.sql


As an example:

$ echo -n $'\xC3'$'\x90' | iconv -f UTF-8 -t ISO-8859-1 | \
   iconv -f ISO-8859-7 -t UTF-8 | hexdump -C
00000000  ce a0                                             |Î |
00000002


And 0xCE 0xA0 is the right UTF-8 encoding for Π.