title: MySQL table default charset and changing it if needed. Is it safe to change it?
body: <p>I have a database and when I do <code>show create table actual_table</code> I see in the output:<br>
  <code>ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1</code>  </p>
  
  <p><code>Latin1</code> is <code>ISO8859-1</code>, right? So does this mean that if I access the DB via e.g. a script that encodes in <code>UTF-8</code> the result in the database could be garbage?<br>
  So if this is the case, should I convert the table's encoding to <code>UTF-8</code>? Is the conversion safe? </p>