Hi I don't use phpMyAdmin myself and I can't remember if it supports UTF-8 encoding Whichever extension that your PHP is using is likely doing a conversion. this is something that the MySQL libraries handle. You can use this to extract the data from the tables and save it. As a test, dump a table's data into a file (have mysqldump, or phpMyAdmin create insert statements for the data). Create a table with UTF-8 encoding and attempt to process that file into it (copy/paste into phpMyAdmin if it's not to big) If that works, then you can go ahead and back up all your tables this way, and enter it into your new UTF-8 ones Without knowing more about your configuration (local/remote, versions, etc.) I can't suggest much else. Niel -- PHP Database Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php