I've decided to switch my web app from ANSI to UTF-8. After converting the encoding of my hardcoded files in Notepad++ (which does a conversion, not only changing the character set) and setting a new meta tag for UTF-8, I now need to convert my database data.
This data has been inputted on ANSI forms, but is stocked as utf8_general_ci according to phpMyAdmin. Obviously I can't just change the MySQL stocking encoding then, because it's already the right one (apparently?).
On the web pages, my accent characters (é, à, etc.) loaded from the DB appear as �.