How Can I Convert Latin1 Characters to UTF-8 in a UTF-8 Database Table?

Converting Latin1 Characters to UTF8 in a UTF8 Table

Your question describes an issue where previously inserted data containing diacritics was corrupted due to incorrect charset handling.

Problem:

Your PHP scripts did not specify the UTF-8 charset for database communication, leading to Latin1 characters being stored in a UTF-8 table. This resulted in the characters being displayed incorrectly as "Ã" sequences.

Solution:

The solution lies in using a MySQL function called convert() to explicitly cast the data from Latin1 encoding to UTF-8. Here's an example query:

UPDATE `table` SET `name` = convert(cast(convert(`name` using latin1) as binary) using utf8)

Explanation:

• The convert() function first casts the current name column value to Latin1 encoding using the latin1 converter.
• The resulting binary string is then cast back to a string using the binary converter.
• Finally, the string is converted to UTF-8 using the utf8 converter.

This conversion process ensures that any corrupted Latin1 characters are properly converted to UTF-8, preserving the correct display of diacritics. Note that the inner conversion using the convert() function may not be necessary in all cases, depending on the specific data corruption.

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