title: How to replace broken German Umlauts with MySQL REPLACE function?
body: <p><em>(I accidentially asked this question first on DBA but found out in the FAQ to ask SQL questions here on SO instead)</em></p>
  
  <p>I'm trying to "repair" a MySQL database (UTF-8 collation) that was imported from an encoding-broken SQL text file.</p>
  
  <p>I.e. the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanic_umlaut" rel="nofollow">German umlauts</a> are broken inside the database. What should read e.g. "ü" is displayed as "Ã¼".</p>
  
  <p>Since I'm aware of the <a href="http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/string-functions.html#function_replace" rel="nofollow"><code>REPLACE</code> function</a>, I first tried the obvious:</p>
  
  <pre><code>SELECT * FROM `mydb`.`mytable` WHERE `mycolumn` LIKE '%Ã¼%';
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>This gave me the expected results.</p>
  
  <p>Next I tried to replace them:</p>
  
  <pre><code>UPDATE `mydb`.`mytable` SET `mycolumn` = REPLACE(`mycolumn`, 'Ã¼', 'ü');
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>To my surprise, this resulted in zero rows affected.</p>
  
  <p>So even <a href="http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html" rel="nofollow">knowing a lot about encoding</a>, I still cannot figure out how to solve this (or whether it is possible at all).</p>
  
  <p><strong>My question:</strong></p>
  
  <p>How to use the <code>REPLACE</code> function to replace broken German umlauts?</p>