Character Encoding and steps I should take...

[JasonLewis]

So I've recently started looking into Character Encoding, after never really bothering with it, and I've got a few questions. After checking out my site it seems I've been using UTF-8 without really realising it, and I'm going to stick with UTF-8. However, when I jump into phpMyAdmin to check out my MySQL tables I run into a few problems.

 

Originally, for my database, the collation was set to latin1_swedish_ci. I have since changed this to utf8_general_ci. This however only affects newly created tables, not the 150 or so tables I currently have which are still latin1_swedish_ci. Do I need to convert the collation of these already existing tables to UTF-8, and if so what's the best method?

 

This takes me to my text editor, NetBeans 7. Do I need to alter anything here, I've not been successful with finding information relating to this?

 

Cheers guys.

[Zane]

ALTER TABLE tbl_name CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET utf8;

http://yoonkit.blogspot.com/2006/03/mysql-charset-from-latin1-to-utf8.html

[JasonLewis]

Right... and this must be done for every column which has a latin1 collation too? Crap, that's a lot of work...

[scanreg]

Will this safely convert all existing data, or is this just for inserting new data?

 

Thanks

[xyph]

It depends on your old charset. UTF-8 is backwards compatible with ASCII, so it generally isn't an issue if converting from that.