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Simple UTF-8 and MySQL how-to
Tuesday, January 23, 2007 ★ 23:48 ★ Category Programming
This is a simple howto to have MySQL talk UTF-8 (the One True Encoding in most cases) to all clients. I’ve read the MySQL manual about character encodings, and in the end it’s pretty simple to get it working:
- Make sure you append
CHARACTER SET 'UTF8'to eachCREATE TABLEstatement. Example:CREATE TABLE test (id SERIAL PRIMARY KEY, somefield VARCHAR(4)) CHARACTER SET 'UTF8';. This can be done at the database level as well (when usingCREATE DATABASE), but most of the times this is done for you by an external party (hoster, sysadmins, ...)
- Issue the following query immediately after you established a database connection (most likely somewhere in your initialization routines):
SET NAMES='UTF8'That’s all. All data stored in and retrieved from MySQL is now in UTF-8. Make sure existing data is converted to UTF-8 as well before importing. I found the easiest way is to convert a database dump using a text editor (eg.
:set encoding=utf8in Vim) or a character set conversion utility such asiconv.
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Wouter Bolsterlee, also known as uws, a postmodern geek living in the Netherlands. Read more about me…
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