title: Best practices when migrating data from one database scheme to another?
body: <p>Often times when I am working on a project, I find my self looking at the database scheme and having to export the data to work with the new scheme. </p>
  
  <p>Lots of times there has been a database where the data stored was fairly crude. What I mean by that is that its stored with lots of unfiltered characters. I find my self writing custom php scripts to filter through this information and create a nice clean UTF-8 CSV file that I then reimport into my new database. </p>
  
  <p>I'd like to know if there are better ways to handle this?</p>