We seriously see a ton of customers coming in with the type of databases that are a nightmare to move over. When you’re dealing with special characters in a database, you have to make sure that the charset and collation are dumped *with* the database, so that when you move it to another server the tables and data create properly. The biggest annoyance so far is converting tables back to UTF-8, as when this is done through the MySQL shell or phpmyadmin is had to be done table-by-table. So, I wrote this simple PHP script to do it all at once:
<?php
// Database info
$dbhost = ‘localhost’;
$dbuser = ‘db_user’;
$dbpass = ‘password’;
$dbname = ‘db_name’;
//—————
header(’Content-type: text/plain’);
$dbconn = mysql_connect($dbhost, $dbuser, $dbpass) or die( mysql_error() );
$db = mysql_select_db($dbname) or die( mysql_error() );
$sql = ‘SHOW TABLES’;
$result = mysql_query($sql) or die( mysql_error() );
while ( $row = mysql_fetch_row($result) )
{
$table = mysql_real_escape_string($row[0]);
$sql = “ALTER TABLE $table DEFAULT CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci”;
mysql_query($sql) or die( mysql_error() );
print “$table changed to UTF-8.\n”;
}
mysql_close($dbconn);
?>
If course, you can adjust the ALTER TABLE statement to any character set and collation that you need.
8 Comments | Add your own
Nice!
Tidy and very useful.
ALTER TABLE $table DEFAULT CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci, CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET utf8
would not only change the default types, but also the actual column data and types.
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/alter-table.html#id1358790
If the data in some rows or whole columns have a wrong encoding, you can let MySQL encode the data properly.
# Single rows
UPDATE table SET column=CONVERT(CONVERT(column USING binary) USING utf8) WHERE id=123
http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2007/12/18/fixing-column-encoding-mess-in-mysql
thanks but your script has errors
odd, considering this has worked for me a dozen or so times.
3 Trackbacks/Pingbacks
Nessa’s Blog: Convert Database to UTF-8…
Nessa has posted a quick way to convert a database from ……
[…] has posted a quick way to convert a database from whatever character set it’s currently on over to UTF-8 with a […]
[…] deal with a lot of database dumps. So this post is a must for me. We seriously see a ton of customers coming in with the type of databases that are […]
Post a Comment