Niki Kovacs wrote: > > when doing a backup database dump, > the resulting dumpfile will be iso-8859-1. This is controlled by the setup for the tables themselves. MySQL does have a default character set, but it will let you create each individual table in any character set you like, and even mix them. The configuration of the OS only affects how things like output to the terminal is interpreted. > Asked in the forums there, Why not try the main MySQL mailing list? It's a different world than the web forum. > We only use french charset here, nothing else, You don't import data from MARC or other sources, then? > I get some weird results in the system messages. Why are you making us guess what the errors are? > Is there any way to keep the system in utf8, and at the same time make > MySQL behave like it was latin1-only? I think what you mean to ask is, can you run the mysql command line tool in a different character set than the system default, so that when it prints out text, it goes to the terminal with the correct character set. The answer is, yes: $ LANG=fr_FR mysql -uDBUSER -p.... > PS: encoding issues are a quite humiliating experience Better learn to understand it. We'll be living with these issues for another decade or two, probably, before multi-byte characters finally take over the world.