Question

In troubleshooting a problem with “?” marks that appear in a web application generated PDF, I’ve discovered that the database has a mismash of character encodings. Most are latin, some are utf, and a few are something else.

While referring to this excellent question and array of responses ( Change MySQL default character set to UTF-8 in my.cnf? ), I now have a fairly clear idea of what needs to happen next. What I’m not entirely clear on is whether changing the character set in my.cnf and on the tables themselves via ALTER TABLE would potentially destroy data or create other “gotchas”. I’m working with hundreds of tables and about 10gb of data.

Is this generally a “safe” procedure to undertake?

Answer 1

It’s been 45 days since posting and no answers, so I will post a link to a very thorough and informative article written by Nic Jansma on his experience converting from Latin1 to UTF-8.

Pay heed to this warning:

“If you simply force the column to UTF-8 without the BINARY conversion, MySQL does a data-changing conversion of your “latin1″
characters into “UTF-8″ and you end up with improperly converted
data.”

The article can be found here.