That's exactly why I use the default ISO-8859-1 encoding for all my MySQL tables...

pjscott on July 10, 2012 | parent | context | favorite | on: Unicode is, in 2012, still “cutting edge.”

That's exactly why I use the default ISO-8859-1 encoding for all my MySQL tables, try to only stick ASCII into it, and store any Unicode text as binary UTF-8, encoded client-side. It's stupid and shouldn't be necessary, but at least MySQL can't screw it up.