HOWTO: Convert mysql data to UTF-8 quickly
Posted on Tuesday, Jun 5, 2007 at 12:37 AM in Linux, Mysql
I've been revamping my Bolivian soccer blog, which I finally updated and made live tonight. In doing so, I needed to convert the data from ISO-8859-1 (back when I didn't know better about how to setup a database) to UTF-8. I was fearing the process would be complicated and tedious, involving some script to read the data and use PHP's mbstring or iconv extensions to do the work. Thanks to a post on a Mysql message board (I wish I'd saved the link, I'd give you full credit), it turned out to be a drop dead simple, or is it quick-and-dirty, 3 step process at the command line using the iconv tool.
$ mysqldump --opt --quote-names my_database > my_database.sql
$ iconv -f ISO_8859-1 -t UTF-8 my_database.sql > my_database-utf-8.sql
$ mysql my_database < my_database-utf-8.sql
Comments
Oscar says
Hence the title being about how to convert data. I should have added the switch to just get the data from mysqldump. Of course, you'd still have to convert the table defintions to use UTF-8.
Sandy says
you're still SOL.
jo says
running iconv (to either latin-1 or UTF-8) on UTF-8 data stored as latin-1 won't work?
jo says
and without that you will have converted your data in vain pretty much