Database encoding problems

[Jirinex]

Posted the same thing in vbulletin.com but maybe more eyes will see it here. Anyway..

My database needs some love and care. We originally created this database back in 2002 with vbulletin 2 and iso-8859-7. Over the years I tried various tools to convert it to full utf8 without success and now this is how it stands. The DB is UTF8, the tables are UTF8, but all the data inside are in iso-8859-7 encoding which causes me various issues.

Anyone has any guide of how I can convert it fully to utf8 and be done with this issue? I am using mysql 5.1.50 and the size is around 2.5gbs. Any help would be much appreciated.

[souperman]

You need to export your data as UTF8, then change the columns/fields to UTF8 data type. Once that's done, import your sql dump. Before you try this, make sure you backup your original data.

[Jirinex]

I can export it as UTF8 but how do I change the columns/fields after to utf8 data type?

[Willo]

If not...download and add it. using it you can change collations with...Warning,,,it's time consuming

[Jirinex]

The collations are fine. The problem is that the data are in ISO-8859-7 and everything else is UTF8.