How to convert cp866 strings encoded in latin1 to unicode?

Question

MySQL

I am transferring the FIAS database to the mysql database.
The trick is this. Databases are available for download in xml or dbf (I hope someone else remembers what it is?) I
thought I chose dbf. Because it's not at all clear what to do with xml, and there is a dbf2mysql utility for dbf
Everything would be fine if not for:
1. The author of the utility, it seems, never thought that someone might need encodings other than latin1
2. Itself base (dbf) in the good old lamp cp866
3. My mysql - in utf8

Total we have. The cp866 strings interpreted by the utility as latin1 are driven into utf8 tables
Question: how to do it like a human?
Merge the dump with forced latin1 and manually distill it first into cp866, and then I tried it into Unicode. But, firstly, the base is impossibly large. Every time you drive back and forth dumps - it's easier to shoot yourself. And, secondly, during such operations, characters in upper case are lost. (Instead of them appears "?").

Logic suggests that you need to overtake the fields into a blob, and then back into varchar with a different encoding, and so on several times. But for some reason it doesn't work.

Suggest options.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

When I solved such a problem, I realized that the easiest way is to write a miniconverter. It took much less time than searching for ready-made solutions.

Answer 2

base in utf? tables in utf? connection in utf? somewhere necessarily latin yes will come out

Answer 3

dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/charset-convert.html
Can it help?