I inherited a website to rebuild, which is displaying French characters incorrectly (’ for ‘, é for é, è for è and so on). These characters are also present as such in the mysql database. The database collation and the collation of content tables was set to “latin_swedish1_ci” when I received it. The websites html header contains <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />.
In order to correct the data I have updated the database collation and the one from one table (as a test) to “utf8mb4_unicode_ci” through phpmyadmin > operations which (as far as I understood) applies an ALTER function. However after these actions, the strings in the database and the table still contain the incorrect characters. Also when exported with utf-8 encoding, the content in the table is showing the incorrect characters.
Does this mean I would need to clean up all the records in the database, or do I overlook something and is there still a way to get the correct characters through the charsets and collation settings?