If you’ve ever dealt with database backups, you’ve probably come across a problem. And that is special characters. Be it umlauts, quotation marks, whatever.

This article is for every webmaster that deals with database content that is not straight English only. Be it Swedish, Spanish, German, Chinese, Japanese… If you run a forum or a website where users can or do use one of these languages, you should read this article.

The article was written by Daniel Schlichtholz, the developer of MySQLDumper - a free and useful script for backing up and restoring databases. The original language was German and I have translated it to English, because there are people using umlauts and other special characters in other languages who would benefit from reading this article.
The original article, in German, can be found here.

Click here, to read the full article in English (split up into 13 small pages for your convenience).

Thanks go to Daniel for writing the original article on the MySQLDumper website.