PHP 6: Mysql with iso-8859-1 chars outputting utf-8: "Could not convert binary string to Unicode string"

Hello! I have a MySQL database where all tables are in the latin1 character set, with accented (Portuguese) characters. In my php.ini I have ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; ; Unicode settings ; ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; unicode.semantics = on unicode.runtime_encoding = iso-8859-1 unicode.script_encoding = iso-8859-1 unicode.output_encoding = utf-8 unicode.from_error_mode = U_INVALID_SUBSTITUTE unicode.from_error_subst_char = 3f unicode.fallback_encoding = iso-8859-1 because all my files and data in mysql server are in iso-8859-1. When connecting to mysql I issue: mysql_query('set names latin1', $this->mysql_link); but when I do query in any record that have accented characters I get this warning (using mysql_fetch_assoc): ---------- Could not convert binary string to Unicode string (converter UTF-8 failed on bytes (0xE7) at offset 9) ---------- for all accented characters in all fields. If I changed the set names query to: mysql_query('set names utf8', $this->mysql_link); it works, but I would like to keep compatibility with PHP 5, and for my application it requires set names to be latin1. Also, my databases are not created with the "utf8" option. As I understood PHP 6's unicode support, all string characters (including mysql result values) are converted from unicode.runtime_encoding to unicode (utf-16), but looks like it is trying to convert from ASCII, which does not have all the accented characters. Am I assuming right? How to make mysql_fetch_assoc assume field values are in iso-8859-1 instead of ASCII? Thanks, Rangel Reale