How to diagnose, and reverse (not prevent) Unicode mangling

Posted by Steve Bennett on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Steve Bennett
Published on 2010-06-02T05:40:39Z Indexed on 2010/06/02 5:43 UTC
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Filed under:

unicode

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strings

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reverse-engineering

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Corruption

Somewhere upstream of me, "something" happened that looks like unicode mangling. One symptom is that a lowercase u umlaut (ü) gets converted to "Ã¼" (ie, character FC gets converted to C3 BC). Assuming that I have no control over this upstream process, how can I reverse-engineer what's going on? And if that is possible, can I crank the sausage machine backwards and get the original text back?

(If it helps to understand this case, the text I received was in the form of a MySQL dump. I think somwewhere in the dump/transport process it got mangled.)

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