phpBB2->phpBB3.2 converter botches conversion

[James Gryphon]

I'm working on converting a phpBB2 board to the newest version of phpBB3. Most of the forum converts fine, but the encoding is consistently incorrect. For example, the text always ends up reading something like "'" where a simple apostrophe was intended and present in the original phpBB2 forum, among other errors.

I've tried a number of things including but not necessarily limited to:
Not doing anything special, just running the conversion as-is.
Using the MySQL database with various different default charsets (Swedish Latin and utf8_bin included).
Changing $lang['ENCODING'] in lang_main.php to utf-8.
Converting a phpBB2 SQL dump file with iconv and changing everything in the text file from iso-8859-1 or latin to utf-8 counterparts, including the tables, before uploading it back to the server and then converting the presumably UTF-8 phpBB2 installation anew.

I've read just about every guide (a number of which imply this should all be automatic and 'easy' -- apparently not anymore) and question about this subject I could find on the first page or so of Google, without having any success with any of their recommendations. That brings us up to this point.

Since phpBB3.2's conversion appears to be just about a wash, my next step would probably be to try an earlier version of 3 under the perhaps misguided hope that it would work better there, and then upgrade to 3.2 afterwards if I find success with any of those interim versions. I thought it was worth checking in, though, to see if there is any information on the subject I've missed.

[AYBG]

Edit: I am a moron.

[3Di]

What I can say is I converted a phpBB 2.0.9 to 3.1.12 just a couple of months ago for a client without having issues of any sort.