title: Crazy characters - trying to insert into UTF-8
body: <p>I'm trying to create a script that copies data from an old legacy mysql database into my new utf-8 formatted database.</p>
  
  <p>One particular field is causing me trouble, its a latin1 field - and one record has the following in it: </p>
  
  <p><code>!-#$%'&amp;*Â£Â¥</code></p>
  
  <p>When the update is performed, I get the following error message: </p>
  
  <p><code>Zend_Db_Statement_Exception: SQLSTATE[HY000]: General error: 1366 Incorrect string value: '\xA3' for column 'messageContent' at row 1 in C:\xampp\htdocs\portal\
  library\Zend\Db\Statement\Pdo.php on line 234</code></p>
  
  <p>Now, I'd like to strip characters that cause a problem, but other than checking <code>ord($character) &lt;= 126</code> I don't know what to do. I'm worried that my method might lose valuable data.</p>
  
  <p>I am using MySQL 5.1.43 on Windows 7 - with PHP 5.3.1</p>