Question

Using SQLite, this works fine. However, when I switch to MySQL, instead of ｸｲﾝ i get ???. The column is TEXT or sometimes VARCHAR(255) (I believe its VARCHAR(255) in this case).

How do I get MySQL to properly save these characters?

Answer 1

Table/column character sets need to be set to a version that supports multibyte like UTF8.

You may be able to tell the current table character set by doing a

mysql> SHOW CREATE TABLE tbl_Name;

It may not show you anything in which case it’s using the default defined in you my.cnf

To change a character set on a table run:

mysql> ALTER TABLE tbl_name CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci;

I don’t recommend this if you have a lot of data or can’t remove the data and start fresh. The transition needs to remove the bad data first.

I read through this post and it seems in depth and from what I can remember of my own battles with this very accurate. http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2006/01/turning_mysql_data_in_latin1_t.html

Also, to create new tables as UTF-8 append CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci to the end of your CREATE TABLE statements