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Asked: 2026-05-24T11:36:09+00:00

I have had issues with my MySQL and using utf-8 and I ended up

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I have had issues with my MySQL and using utf-8 and I ended up using HTML characters, but I am starting to regret that very much. I now have 4 tables with a lot of foreign characters saved as HTML.

I have been able to rewrite programming and setup MySQL to process utf-8 properly, but what would be the best way to convert the strings to utf-8?

INSERT INTO `languages` (`id`, `title`, `native`, `alias`, `status`, `weight`, `updated`, `created`) VALUES
(1, 'English', 'English', 'en', 1, 1, '2009-11-02 21:37:38', '2009-11-02 20:52:00'),
(2, 'Dutch', 'Nederlands', 'nl', 1, NULL, '0000-00-00 00:00:00', '0000-00-00 00:00:00'),
(8, 'French', 'Français', 'fr', 1, NULL, '0000-00-00 00:00:00', '0000-00-00 00:00:00'),
(3, 'Spanish', 'Español', 'es', 1, NULL, '0000-00-00 00:00:00', '0000-00-00 00:00:00'),
(4, 'Italian', 'Italiano', 'it', 1, NULL, '0000-00-00 00:00:00', '0000-00-00 00:00:00'),
(6, 'German', 'Deutsch', 'de', 1, NULL, '0000-00-00 00:00:00', '0000-00-00 00:00:00'),
(7, 'Portuguese', 'Português', 'pt', 1, NULL, '0000-00-00 00:00:00', '0000-00-00 00:00:00'),
(11, 'Swedish', 'Svenska', 'sv', 1, NULL, '0000-00-00 00:00:00', '0000-00-00 00:00:00'),
(9, 'Polish', 'Polski', 'pl', 1, NULL, '0000-00-00 00:00:00', '0000-00-00 00:00:00'),
(12, 'Russian', 'Русский', 'ru', 1, NULL, '0000-00-00 00:00:00', '0000-00-00 00:00:00'),
(13, 'Afrikaans', 'Afrika', 'af', 1, NULL, '0000-00-00 00:00:00', '0000-00-00 00:00:00'),
(14, 'English', 'English', 'en', 1, NULL, '0000-00-00 00:00:00', '0000-00-00 00:00:00'),
(15, 'Albanian', 'Shqip', 'sq', 1, NULL, '0000-00-00 00:00:00', '0000-00-00 00:00:00'),
(16, 'Arabic', 'العربية', 'ar', 1, NULL, '0000-00-00 00:00:00', '0000-00-00 00:00:00'),
(17, 'Farsi', 'الفارسية', 'fa', 1, NULL, '0000-00-00 00:00:00', '0000-00-00 00:00:00'),
(18, 'Chinese (traditional)', '中文(繁體)', 'cht', 1, NULL, '0000-00-00 00:00:00', '0000-00-00 00:00:00'),
(19, 'Japanese', '日本', 'ja', 1, NULL, '0000-00-00 00:00:00', '0000-00-00 00:00:00'),
(20, 'Latin', 'Latina', 'la', 1, NULL, '0000-00-00 00:00:00', '0000-00-00 00:00:00'),
(21, 'Chinese (simplified)', '中文(简体)', 'chs', 1, NULL, '0000-00-00 00:00:00', '0000-00-00 00:00:00'),
(22, 'Turkish', 'Türkçe', 'tr', 1, NULL, '0000-00-00 00:00:00', '0000-00-00 00:00:00'),
(23, 'Catalan', 'Català', 'ca', 1, NULL, '0000-00-00 00:00:00', '0000-00-00 00:00:00'),
(24, 'Hindi', 'हिन्दी', 'hi', 1, NULL, '0000-00-00 00:00:00', '0000-00-00 00:00:00'),
(25, 'Hungarian', 'Magyar', 'hu', 1, NULL, '0000-00-00 00:00:00', '0000-00-00 00:00:00');

Above is an example of SQL data.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Round trip the data through PHP. Do a select, grab the relevant fields and run them through htmlentities() to convert back into actual characters, then stuff the data back into the database.

    MySQL itself doesn’t have any entity encoding/decoding support, so doing the round trip is the quickest/easiest fix.

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