Q: Storing special characters in MySQL 5.6 My application accepts a variety of characters in MySQL database. 
One such example is:
ã ã'Œã§ã''ç°¡å˜ï¼Twitter自動ã¤ã¶ã'"ã設定ãŒã§ãるサイトï¼AutoTweet(オートツイート)! CH1J2tthG6 定期的ã«ã¤ã¶ã'"ãbotã'"URLã®å®£ä¼ã«ã''使ãˆã¾ã™ï¼ 2318999869;

Could you please recommend what COLLATION should I use to store such values? 
By default MySQL uses latin1_swedish_ci, which I believe will not store these characters correctly. 
My purpose is to only fetch such characters and not use them for sorting. So performance tweaks are highly recommended.
Thanks!
`

A: Not a "Collation" problem; rather it is a "Character set" problem.
Probably you 


*

*had utf8-encoding of your text when you INSERTed it -- where did the data come from?, and

*had SET NAMES latin1 (or equivalent) -- What kind of code did you use for the INSERT?  What version of MySQL were you using?, and

*stored the bytes into a column declared as CHARACTER SET latin1 -- Let's see SHOW CREATE TABLE
Assuming that all matches, then the solution is first to fix the data via the 2-step ALTER mechanism to convert the latin1 column to utf8 without altering the bytes.  It is described in my CHARSET blog.  (The specifics of the ALTERs depend on SHOW CREATE TABLE.)
(If they don't all match, the I need to dig further.)
After that, there may (or may not) be an issue with how you are SELECTing the data to get it out.  Be sure to have SET NAMES set to the encoding (utf8 or latin1) that you need for your output.
Edit
Hmmm... I don't recognize most of those characters as being the regular mangling, so let's dig further.
