How to convert mysql latin1 to utf8

Question

I inherited a web system that I need to develop further. The system seems to be created by someone who read two chapters of a PHP tutorial and thought he could code...

Answer 1

Change column data type

to VARBINARY and it's automatically convert the latin1 datas

Thank you guys. I hope it's helpful.

Answer 2

I managed to solve it by running updates on text fields like this:

UPDATE table SET title = CONVERT(CONVERT(CONVERT(title USING latin1) USING binary) USING UTF8)

Answer 3

The situation isn't as bad as you think it is, unless you already have lots of non-Roman characters (that is, characters that aren't representable in Latin-1) in your database already. Latin-1 is a proper subset of utf8. Your web app works in utf8 and your tables' contents are in utf8 as well. So there's no need to convert the tables.

So, try changing the SET NAMES latin1 to SET NAMES utf8. It will probably solve your problem, by allowing your php program's connection to work with the same character set as the code on either end of the connection.

Read this. http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.7/en/charset-connection.html