Question

In a mySql table I’m using Latin1 character set to store text in a varchar field. As our website now is supported in more countries we need support for UTF8 instead. What will happen if I change these fields to UTF8 instead? Is it secure to do this or will it mess up the data inside these fields? Is it something I need to think about when changing the field to UTF8?

Thanks!

Answer 1

MySQL handles this nicely:

CREATE TEMPORARY TABLE t1 (
  c VARCHAR(10)
) CHARACTER SET ="latin1";

INSERT INTO t1 VALUES ("æøå");
SELECT * FROM t1; # 'æøå'

ALTER TABLE t1 CHARACTER SET = "utf8";
SELECT * FROM t1; # 'æøå'

DROP TEMPORARY TABLE t1;

EDIT: And there are no latin-1 characters that cannot be stored as utf-8, so you shouldn’t get any dataloss