[jcranmer]

> - The default 'latin1' character set is in fact cp1252, not ISO-8859-1, meaning it contains the extra characters in the Windows codepage.

Actually, it's generally saner to assume that people mean Windows-1252 when they say ISO-8859-1. Charset labeling is frequently incorrect, and C1 characters are so infrequently used that seeing one pop up probably means you actually wanted Windows-1252 instead.

[zaarn]

Well, the thing is that Mysql latin1/cp1252 isn't actually code page 1252, it's a tad different. There are extra characters that CP1252 doesn't know about, so it's not entirely compatible with CP1252 or Windows-1252.