HELP - Encoding Characters - SMF 1.1.12 To IP Board 3.1.2 Conversion

Good day and happy new year

I have a website and an SMF forum hosted, lately I have decide to switch to IP Board for forum.

Everything went ok, I have installed the IP Board, new database etc.

Now with the conversion I have problem, I have try a lot, as far as I could because I am not an expert but I couldn't correct the problem or find a solution if you like.

When I am converting the SMF forum, the IP Board application/converter asks for the "Database Charset" and gives also these remarks, "In almost all cases, this should be left blank. If you experience problems where non-latin characters show as a question mark after the conversion, try setting this to "UTF8"."

1.My first conversion went ok, without adding the "UTF8" at "Database Charset" but after a while I have realized that most of the Greek characters, not all, had not converted well, it looks like this,
Κι αν έρθουν δύσκολοι καιροί
Μη χάνεις την ελπίδα
Σαν κυπαρίσσι να σταθείς
Σε κάθε καταιγίδα.
Χρόνια πολλά με υγεία και χαρά.

I didn't know what was the problem so I have started again.

2.At my second conversion i have add at "Database Charset" the "UTF8" but the problem was still there!

I have searched a lot at web and I have realized that the problem comes form my existing SMF database, which is old, because the encoding is "latin1_swedish_ci" and not "UTF8" as far as I read at web.
Most people reporting this problem not only with IP Board but as a general problem with a conversion from an old database which is encoding like this "latin1_swedish_ci".

They suggest all that before the conversion the old latin1_swedish_ci database has to first converted to UTF8 in order after to be everything ok.

I have then searched and searched again and at last I have show also that my existing SMF database is also latin1_swedish_ci and probably thats why I have the existing problem.

So far so good but I have no idea how to convert my existing SMF database to UTF8 and most of all I am afraid not to do any mistake and corrupt the database.


Any help is appreciated


Thanks