[drupal-support] Replacing characters in all nodes

[paul at chintha.com]

Hi all,
 Here at chintha.com, we have a not-so-common situation. At
www.chintha.com we are using drupal for hosting a multi-language site. We
have malayalam unicode and english content in the nodes and comments.

 Recently there is a change in the malayalam unicode character encodings.
So 6 characters have new codes assigned to them by unicode organization.
The new fonts for malayalam will be using the new encodings. If one user
is using a new font, they will not be able to see the 6 letters, which
have new encodings now. Eventually everyone is supposed to use the new
encoding.

 The requirement now is to convert the characters with old encoding to the
new encoding. How do i do a search for the old characters and replace
with the new characters in all nodes and comments? Is it possible to do
this in the database directly?

 Any comments/ideas/code snippets are greatly appreciated.

thanks,
Paul