title: How to convert from windows-1257 to utf-8 (mysql)
body: <p>I'm looking for a help with encoding problem I've been struggling for couple days now already.</p>
  
  <p>I have a database with Collation "latin1_swedish_ci". When I view a single entry it shows a messed up text</p>
  
  <pre><code>grieþos informçs
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>it should be </p>
  
  <pre><code>griežos informēs
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Ok so... I tried to output text into browser with php script and set</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=windows-1257" /&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Now... it shows data correctly ("griežos informēs"). What I need to do is convert this data to UTF-8 so I can use</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" /&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>and get everything displayed correctly.</p>
  
  <p>I tried to use Notepad2 and create a file with encoding windows-1257 then copy text from database and save it.... same problem.</p>
  
  <p>Tried to even create a table in that database with utf-8 collation and insert data there... no luck - just shows ? where special chars should be.</p>
  
  <p>Any help would be appreciated,</p>
  
  <p>Thanks</p>