Problem converting to UTF-8

[epersidi]

I had a site + phpbb2 forum with a ISO-8859-7 (Greek) encoding.
Later on i moved on to joomla and i converted the forum to fireboard (a joomla forum engine in case you haven't heard of it) but i didn't check the encoding of the database so it defaulted to latin1_swedish_ci. So now the db probably contains a mixture of these two encodings (i know it sounds crazy but it's at least near to the truth). Despite that, the forum and the site displays correctly when the encoding is set to ISO-8859-7 (meaning i currently have no problems but...) The thing is that i want to move on to the newest Joomla version (1.5...) which uses UTF-8 encoding so i must convert the database to the new encoding. But this is just impossible, the outcome is always some garbage, no matter which technique i use (and i've used many believe me). Something that might tip you to the right direction is that when viewing my db from phpmyadmin, no matter which encoding i set the page to appear, the greek words appear as garbage characters BUT as you can see by visiting my site everything seems normal with ISO-8859-7.

Any help really appreciated.

P.S. My site is <snip>. Try converting some of it's greek texts to UTF-8 and still appearing correctly.

[edited by: engine at 11:04 am (utc) on Jan. 3, 2009]
[edit reason] See TOS [/edit]

[epersidi]

I didn't mean to advertise my site by putting the address there. How are you ppl supposed to take a look at what i'm talking about. Anyway can anyone suggest any tools or ways to convert the db ?

[janharders]

I'd do it with a script - you know when you switched so you can pretty much tell which encoding will be used on what entries.

then, I'd just take a second db and move all the entries to that db (which should be set to utf-8) and convert in the script before inserting the data.
if you have problems with that, create a small testcase with a simple table, 2 rows, one of each encoding and someone here can certainly come up with a solution that isn't too much trouble.