Based on your default database encoding, character_set_database=latin1, you should force your client to use latin1. Your client is currently in utf8 and the database appears to be in latin1. This assumes that your table is also using utf8.

To make sure your data is stored correctly in MySQL, you can force the mysql client to use latin1.

1 Force the Client to use latin1

mysql -u root -p --default-character-set=latin1 nameofthedatabase

Then run your SELECT statement to verify the character formatting

select budgetID,StartDate,modifiedBy from Table_name order by budgetID desc limit 10

2 Backup the database using latin1

You can also dump the database using the same option

mysqldump -u root -p --default-character-set=latin1 nameofthedatabase > nameofthedatabase.sql

Then you could view the dump file nameofthedatabase.sql using a standard text editor like textpad or gedit to see if the characters are encoded correctly.

Collation is a set of rules that determine how rows are sorted and how they are compared. Collation does not affect the encoding which is the problem you are currently having.

If both options still give you weird symbols, the import file may not have been correctly formatted in the first place.

Based on your default database encoding, character_set_database=latin1, you should force your client to use latin1. Your client is currently in utf8 and the database appears to be in latin1. This assumes that your table is also using latin1.

To make sure your data is stored correctly in MySQL, you can force the mysql client to use latin1.

1 Force the Client to use latin1

mysql -u root -p --default-character-set=latin1 nameofthedatabase

Then run your SELECT statement to verify the character formatting

select budgetID,StartDate,modifiedBy from Table_name order by budgetID desc limit 10

2 Backup the database using latin1

You can also dump the database using the same option

mysqldump -u root -p --default-character-set=latin1 nameofthedatabase > nameofthedatabase.sql

Then you could view the dump file nameofthedatabase.sql using a standard text editor like textpad or gedit to see if the characters are encoded correctly.

Collation is a set of rules that determine how rows are sorted and how they are compared. Collation does not affect the encoding which is the problem you are currently having.

If both options still give you weird symbols, the import file may not have been correctly formatted in the first place.