Environment:
- Apache 2.0.48
- PHP 4.3.4
- MySQL 4.1

I’m trying to run Polish character set (Latin2) out on my site, and here is what I did:
1. I have changed HTML encoding to iso-8859-2
2. I have added a line to php.ini -> default_charset = "iso-8859-2"
3. …and Apache by default did have Latin2 enabled.
4. I have added the following into my.cnf

default-character-set=latin2
set-variable=default-character-set=latin2

What I’m experiencing:

- Characters appear OK on the page
- When I simply save and retrieve values/characters from the database they also look OK… (database saves those as some weird characters)*
? But it seems that more complex queries (involving sorting) do NOT work.

I’m guessing that a DEFAULT CHARACTER SET would need to be changed in MySQL but I don’t know how to do it from command line or some other way. Is there anything else I need to do to make this thing work?

Any HELP would be greatly appreciated since I’ve been looking for an answer for over 2 weeks. THANKS!!!

* also when I tried to create a backup the text file (output) did not contain special characters.

read:
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql/en/Charset-general.html

and:
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql/en/Charset-collate.html