Question

in php I’m getting data from an utf8_unicode_ci database and storing the same into utf8_general_ci db.
That seems to be not possible when the text contains em dashes.

Does anyone know if there is a way in php to convert the data from utf8_unicode to utf8_general?

Thanks a lot.

Answer 1

Both utf8_general_ci instead of utf8_normal_ci are collations of the same character encoding/set (i.e. UTF-8). An a collation does define the order and equivalence of characters:

A difference between the collations is that this is true for utf8_general_ci:

ß = s

Whereas this is true for utf8_unicode_ci, which supports the German DIN-1 ordering (also known as dictionary order):

ß = ss

See Unicode Character Sets for more information.

So this shouldn’t have only affect operations where you compare characters/strings. Any other operation is unaffected.