Nessa has posted a quick way to convert a database from whatever character set it's currently on over to UTF-8 with a handy PHP script.

When you're dealing with special characters in a database, you have to make sure that the charset and collation are dumped *with* the database, so that when you move it to another server the tables and data create properly. The biggest annoyance so far is converting tables back to UTF-8, as when this is done through the MySQL shell or phpmyadmin is had to be done table-by-table.

The script logs into the database and pulls all of the table information out (could be a lengthy list depending on the database) and runs an ALTER TABLE to change its character set to 'UTF8'.