How to convert these strange characters? (ë, Ã, ì, ù, Ã)

These are utf-8 encoded characters. Use utf8_decode() to convert them to normal ISO-8859-1 characters.

If you see those characters you probably just didn’t specify the character encoding properly. Because those characters are the result when an UTF-8 multi-byte string is interpreted with a single-byte encoding like ISO 8859-1 or Windows-1252.

In this case ë could be encoded with 0xC3 0xAB that represents the Unicode character ë (U+00EB) in UTF-8.

Even though utf8_decode is a useful solution, I prefer to correct the encoding errors on the table itself. In my opinion it is better to correct the bad characters themselves than making "hacks" in the code. Simply do a replace on the field on the table. To correct the bad encoded characters from OP :

update <table> set <field> = replace(<field>, "ë", "ë")
update <table> set <field> = replace(<field>, "Ã", "à")
update <table> set <field> = replace(<field>, "ì", "ì")
update <table> set <field> = replace(<field>, "ù", "ù")

Where <table> is the name of the mysql table and <field> is the name of the column in the table. Here is a very good check-list for those typically bad encoded windows-1252 to utf-8 characters -> Debugging Chart Mapping Windows-1252 Characters to UTF-8 Bytes to Latin-1 Characters.

Remember to backup your table before trying to replace any characters with SQL!

[I know this is an answer to a very old question, but was facing the issue once again. Some old windows machine didnt encoded the text correct before inserting it to the utf8_general_ci collated table.]

I actually found something that worked for me. It converts the text to binary and then to UTF8.

Source Text that has encoding issues: If ‘Yes’, what was your last

SELECT CONVERT(CAST(CONVERT(
    (SELECT CONVERT(CAST(CONVERT(english_text USING LATIN1) AS BINARY) USING UTF8) AS res FROM m_translation WHERE id = 865) 
USING LATIN1) AS BINARY) USING UTF8) AS 'result';

Corrected Result text: If ‘Yes’, what was your last

My source was wrongly encoded twice so I had two do it twice. For one time you can use:

SELECT CONVERT(CAST(CONVERT(column_name USING latin1) AS BINARY) USING UTF8) AS res FROM m_translation WHERE id = 865;

Please excuse me for any formatting mistakes