When you dealing with working websites, specially upgrading an existing website you might need to convert some files encoding -- you knwo what im talking about :) all the 1.0.9 joomla websites still out there in the web are probebly will require to convert there database encoding.

We at El-Tech created a nice tool and wraped it up under a joomla 1.5 component here:  http://www.el-tech.co.il  under My Char Converter.

This is an ALPHA version of the component so feel free to suggest any upgrades

The component support can use all http://www.unicode.org encoding files (just upload them to the website).

the following encoding are available and tested till now:

• utf-8
• cp037
• cp1006
• cp1026
• cp424
• cp437
• cp500
• cp737
• cp775
• cp850
• cp852
• cp855
• cp856
• cp857
• cp860
• cp861
• cp862
• cp863
• cp864
• cp865
• cp866
• cp869
• cp874
• cp875
• gsm0338
• iso-8859-1
• iso-8859-10
• iso-8859-11
• iso-8859-13
• iso-8859-14
• iso-8859-15
• iso-8859-16
• iso-8859-2
• iso-8859-3
• iso-8859-4
• iso-8859-5
• iso-8859-6
• iso-8859-7
• iso-8859-8
• iso-8859-9
• koi8-r
• koi8-u
• mazovia
• nextstep
• stdenc
• symbol
• turkish
• us-ascii
• us-ascii-quotes
• windows-1250
• windows-1251
• windows-1252
• windows-1253
• windows-1254
• windows-1255
• windows-1256
• windows-1257
• windows-1258
• x-mac-ce
• x-mac-cyrillic
• x-mac-greek
• x-mac-icelandic
• x-mac-roman
• zdingbat

check it out:  http://www.el-tech.co.il/index.php?option=com_mycharconvert&Itemid=53