Thank you. New question concerning text encoding

[Andy Dustman]

The default character set used by MySQL for the connection is latin1.
If you control the server, you can configure this in the system my.cnf.
Otherwise, it is possible to set it in a local configuration file and
use the read_default_file option to connect to set it.

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql/en/charset-connection.html

I think setting the default to utf-8 on the server is your best bet, if
you are able to.