Waynn Lue wrote:
> I'm trying to figure out if the fact that the charset
> is set to latin1 is the reason why.

It shouldn't be. The registered trademark symbol is code point 0xAE in
ISO 8859-1 according to the 'pedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8859-1

So, it would seem that your data source isn't giving you 8859-1. GIGO.

> iconv
> This was mentioned somewhere, but no one had a concrete implementation.

There's a command line tool by that name that converts text between
character sets, but I don't see how that applies here. You could use it
to convert a dump file, but you're already on record as not wanting to
do that, so...

> I assume I should check if my mysql has support for UTF-8,

I believe it just has to be 4.1 or newer. And, that's only necessary so
you can get UTF-8 aware sorting and such. You don't need any special
support to just _store_ UTF-8 data.