Convert your MySQL database from latin1/latin1_general_ci to UTF-8 character encoding.
I personally use phpMyAdmin and Notepad++ (on Windows). This could take about 1 to 2 hours. This step-by-step is not actually by me. >>Check out my source.
- Create a backup of the entire database with phpMyAdmin.
- Change your database to UTF-8 (ALTER DATABASE mydb CHARACTER SET utf8;). This will only affect new tables, so you're not thru yet.
- Select the table(s) to change, and use the export function of phpMyAdmin.
- Copy the exported data (INSERT INTO) without the header (CREATE) into Notepad++.
- Change the table's charset (ALTER TABLE mytable DEFAULT CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci;).
- Change all fields with latin charsets to utf8_general_ci (e.g. ALTER TABLE mytable CHANGE myfield myfield TEXT CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci NOT NULL;). Please note that this SQL only works for TEXT fields, refer to the article on wordpress.org on how to convert ENUM, VARCHARS and so on, or use phpMyAdmin to do so for you. If you have a lot of columns with the same format to convert, just copy and paste one SQL line, and change the column names in each. Paste those lines into phpMyAdmin's SQL editor, that's a lot faster than doing it for each column.
- By now, you should have the table as well as all columns in UTF-8.
- Switch to Notepad++, where all you INSERTs for that table are, and convert those lines to UTF-8.
- Copy and paste it into phpMyAdmin's SQL editor.
- Repeat steps 3 to 9 for each table, and you should have your database converted to UTF-8.
Converting the rest of your site to UTF-8
First, start with your meta tag:
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<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
Next up, if applicable, change your database connection script in PHP
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mysql_set_charset("utf8");
And/or if you use Zend Framework, edit your config file:
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database.params.charset = "utf8"
and your bootstrap:
For the below, no space after "$".
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ini_set('default_charset', 'UTF-8' $ view->setEncoding('UTF-8'););
