MySQL truncates diacritic and accented characters...

[Viktoras Didziulis]

Happy new year for all and everybody!
 
I know there are MySQL experts on this list :-). The problem I encountered
recently with the MySQL 5 is that while loading table from file it truncates
all strings in varchar fields that have an accented or diacritic characters
(these are names of taxonomists). Thus for example (Lacépède, 1803) is
truncated to (Lac. Varchar maximum length is set to 255 and the length of
the most truncated strings is below 20. Is there an easy way to overcome
this misbehavior of the MySQL when populating tables from a file ?
 
Tried using CHARSET utf8 when creating table or field, but it did not help
either... Maybe collation would help, but which one - the default causes the
truncation ?
 
Best wishes
Viktoras