I\'ve been revamping my Bolivian soccer blog, which I finally updated and made live tonight.  In doing so, I needed to convert the data from ISO-8859-1 (back when I didn\'t know better about how to setup a database) to UTF-8.  I was fearing the process would be complicated and tedious, involving some script to read the data and use PHP\'s mbstring or iconv extensions to do the work.  Thanks to a post on a Mysql message board (I wish I\'d saved the link, I\'d give you full credit), it turned out to be a drop dead simple, or is it quick-and-dirty, 3 step process at the command line using the iconv tool.

$ mysqldump --opt --quote-names my_database > my_database.sql
$ iconv -f ISO_8859-1 -t UTF-8 my_database.sql > my_database-utf-8.sql
$ mysql my_database < my_database-utf-8.sql