#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use DBI;
use Encode;

# set up connection parameters $dbname, $host, $user, $password, then:

my $dbh = DBI->connect( "DBI::mysql:database=$dbname;host=$host", $user, $password );

my $sth = $dbh->prepare( "select item_name from table1" );
$sth->execute;
my ( $is_wide_utf8, $is_not_utf8, $is_ascii );
while ( my ( $item ) = $sth->fetchrow_array )
{
    my $nbytes = length( $item );
    my $nchars = eval "length( decode( 'utf8', $item, Encode::FB_CROAK ))";
    if ( $@ ) {  # decode croaked -- text string is not utf8
        $is_not_utf8++;
        # figure out something else to try (maybe shiftjis?)
    }
    elsif ( $nchars == $nbytes ) {
        $is_ascii++;
    }
    else {
        $is_wide_utf8++;
    }
}
print "$is_ascii entries found to be ascii-only\n" if ( $is_ascii );
print "$is_wide_utf8 entries found to be utf8\n" if ( $is_wide_utf8);
print "$is_not_uft8 entries found to be non-utf8\n"  if ( $is_not_utf8 );