Question

I want to decode Unicode strings to UTF-8 when inserting in a table. Here’s what I have:

('\u0645\u064e\u062b\u0652\u0646\u064e\u0649 \u00a0\u062c \u0645\u064e\u062b\u064e\u0627\u0646\u064d')

So I want these values to be converted to UTF-8, for example:

INSERT INTO `nouns`(`NOUNID`, `WORDID`, `SINGULAR`, `PLURAL`) VALUES (781, 3188, '\u0646\u064e\u062c\u0652\u0645', ('\u0646\u064e\u062c\u0652\u0645'))

I am migrating my h2 database to MySQL, so I got this when scripting my h2 db:

INSERT INTO PUBLIC.NOUNS(NOUNID, WORDID, SINGULAR, PLURAL) VALUES
  (1, 5, STRINGDECODE('\u0623\u0628\u0651 '), STRINGDECODE
  ('\u0623\u0624\u064f\u0628\u0651')),
  (2, 9, STRINGDECODE('\u0623\u064e\u0628\u0627\u0628'), ''),

---

basicly thees \u0623\u0632\u0651 are arabic charchters in unicode representation and I want to convert them in real arabic characters, to be stored like that in database.
I was trying convert function, but because I am new to mysql I couldn’t achive this:

SELECT CONVERT(_ucs2'\u0623' USING utf8);

Answer 1

There is no built-in function to decode unicode escapes in MySQL, but you can create one; see below:

Note that the backslash is an escape character in MySQL, so you’ll need to double them when you write SQL: '\\u0623\\u064e\\u0628\\u0627\\u0628'

DELIMITER //

CREATE FUNCTION STRINGDECODE(str TEXT CHARSET utf8)
RETURNS text CHARSET utf8 DETERMINISTIC
BEGIN
declare pos int;
declare escape char(6) charset utf8;
declare unescape char(3) charset utf8;
set pos = locate('\\u', str);
while pos > 0 do
    set escape = substring(str, pos, 6);
    set unescape = char(conv(substring(escape,3),16,10) using ucs2);
    set str = replace(str, escape, unescape);
    set pos = locate('\\u', str, pos+1);
end while;
return str;
END//

DELIMITER ;