This may be useful when for example the character encoding has been messed up and you need to correct existing data. This example will correct swedish accented characters in a uft8 – latin1 mixup. UPDATE my_table SET my_field = REPLACE(my_field,’Ã¥’,'å’); UPDATE my_table SET my_field = REPLACE(my_field,’ä’,'ä’); UPDATE my_table SET my_field = REPLACE(my_field,’ö’,'ö’); …