In that case, you should either convert the strings from utf8 to cp850 before you store them to the database, or else you should convert them after fetching them back from the database, before you print them to a file or display them. (See the "from_to" function in Encode.)

Whatever you do, make sure the database content always has the same encoding for all text data. Mixing different encodings into a single database would be as bad as mixing them in a single paragraph -- it becomes impossible (or at least terribly difficult) to make the data coherent.

(It is possible to have a table with different fields using different encodings; you could even have pairs of fields, like "name" and "name_encoding" so that the encoding of "name" is specified for each row, but that's more trouble than it's worth. Keep it simple.)