Character encoding cross-reference

I have just migrated a database containing Latin American place names from MS Access to my MySQL. In the process, every instance of á has been changed to ‡. Here is my question:

Does there exist some sort of reference for looking up which character encoding has been translated to which other? For example, a place where I can enter a character and see how it would be misrepresented after a variety of erroneous enc开发者_C百科oding translations (e.g. ASCII to ISO 8859-1, ISO 8859-1 to UTF-8, etc.)?

Not that I'm aware of, but if you have a list of possible encodings, you can write a simple program like:

for x in ENCODINGS:
    for y in ENCODINGS:
        try:
            if 'á'.encode(x) == '‡'.encode(y):
                print(x, '→', y)
        except UnicodeError:
            pass

Doing that, it appears in your case that the original encoding is one of:

• mac_arabic
• mac_centeuro
• mac_croatian
• mac_farsi
• mac_iceland
• mac_latin2
• mac_roman
• mac_romanian
• mac_turkish

and the misinterpreted encoding is one of:

• cp1250
• cp1251
• cp1252
• cp1253
• cp1254
• cp1255
• cp1256
• cp1257
• cp1258
• palmos

If you live in a "Western" locale, then mac_roman → cp1252 is the most likely possibility.