MYSQL character-conversion problems

Recently, I have read more entries on MYSQL character convertion problems.
I have got one, too. ( Mind it, it is a case study ?? )
I had to move my blog from one host to another.
Dump the database, etc ….. no problem, except that the characters were mangled at the new host.
Yeah, and some issues due to version differences between mysql 4.0 and 4.1.
So, I made a clean install on the new host and dumped the database, filling it with the old data.
Posting the tables one by one helped to find out the syntax differences.
No way, I could find out the exact charset and collation on the old host.
In both cases, the data seemed like utf-8 but with some slight differences.
It took me more than two day research and some intelligent guesses to solve the problem.
I found an online character-converter:

https://www.motobit.com/util/charset-codepage-conversion.asp

There are more online services like this.

I posted my sql-dump and defined my source what looked like utf-8 as iso-8859-2
(that was the intelligent guess) and converted it to utf-8. That done the trick.

I already read a lot of hubbub about utf-8 and character-conversion but it made me no more knowlegable on the subject.

Well, if it may be of help for some then take it ??