Character encoding issue

Hi,
I am a developer who inherited an application which has corrupt data in the database. THe corrupt data is any character that is a special character. Basically, what happens is the application throughout has the encoding set to UTF-8. The problem occurs when the form passes the special character to the servlet and it get converted to Latin character set. This is where the corruption occurs and gets put into the database incorrectly.

I am in the process of fixing this problem, but I need to be able to convert the data to Latin, ISO8859-1, and then back to UTF-8 to fix the data.

My question is can this be done easily by coverting the entire database to ISO-8859-1 then back to UTF-8?

THe database currently is set to encode in UTF-8.

We have a java program to convert the data and to ISO and back to UTF-8. I am thinking there should be an easier way to do this, then doing it through Java.

I did use the convert(abstract,'WE8ISO8859P1') function, but it did not seem to work correctly for all conversion of the data.

Any help would be appreciated.
Joe