Hello. Start from reading this part of the manual: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/charset.html
> From my understanding, the database itself never do any conversion, > meaning if you insert utf8 data into tables declared as latin1 it > doesn't really matter if you retrieve the data as utf8 on the client > side(true?) Database does do conversion. If fields in a table have latin1 character set, all characters that are not present in latin1, will be converted most probably to '?'. utf8 can held all symbols which are in latin1, and in my opinion there shouldn't be any problems. mel list_php wrote: > Hi list, > > I guess this is a classic problem...! > I found that on the web: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/9022?wlg=yes, > where basically the guy did " dump data, change the charset in the table > definition and reinsert the records into an utf8 database" and ended up > with some problems... > > I saw somewhere in the mysql doc (unable to find the link back though) > that converting between charsets can be tricky, especially if you're not > sure of what you actually have. > Which is my problem: the tables are latin1, but some people may have > executed queries from the command line (utf8) and inserted data (which > are then utf8 right?), some may have used an utf8 phpmyadmin (producing > utf8 data?) and some a old isolatin one.(which would then give latin1 > data?) > > I think the majority of the data are latin1, but there may be some utf8 > at some places. > I have mostly "basic" characters, and a few names with accents. > I saw somewhere that you can convert to binary before to be sure of > keeping things right. > From my understanding, the database itself never do any conversion, > meaning if you insert utf8 data into tables declared as latin1 it > doesn't really matter if you retrieve the data as utf8 on the client > side(true?) > > I strongly suspect that I'm kind of intolerant to encodings and how to > manage them, I just don't get it. > Does anybody knows what is the best way to do? > Would a dump be enough? > Does the dump itself need to be utf8 encoded to be loaded properly? > Do I need to load it through an utf8 "interface"? I have an old iso > latin shell, an utf8 one, and 2 versions of phpmyadmin, one latin1 and > one utf8: does it matter where I will load the dump from? > > Any help more than welcome! > > Thanks, > melanie > > _________________________________________________________________ > Be the first to hear what's new at MSN - sign up to our free > newsletters! http://www.msn.co.uk/newsletters > -- For technical support contracts, goto https://order.mysql.com/?ref=ensita This email is sponsored by Ensita.NET http://www.ensita.net/ __ ___ ___ ____ __ / |/ /_ __/ __/ __ \/ / Gleb Paharenko / /|_/ / // /\ \/ /_/ / /__ [EMAIL PROTECTED] /_/ /_/\_, /___/\___\_\___/ MySQL AB / Ensita.NET <___/ www.mysql.com -- MySQL General Mailing List For list archives: http://lists.mysql.com/mysql To unsubscribe: http://lists.mysql.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]
