How to change chareset

[SilverBoy]

Hi

I have a big forum, the main language is Arabic, and the encoding used is windows-1256, all tables are Sweden_latin1, I'm thinking in change the coding to utf8 to get more corrected search result in forum search and to get emoji codes to run without problems.

Is it a right decision? and what are the other benefits of this choice? and how I can change my database to get all things work perfectly.

Thanks in advance.

[SilverBoy]

no tips?