When you're dealing with special characters in a database, you have to make sure that the charset and collation are dumped *with* the database, so that when you move it to another server the tables and data create
properly. The biggest annoyance so far is converting tables back to UTF-8, as when this is done through the MySQL shell or phpmyadmin is had to be done table-by-table. The following simple PHP script to do it all at once:
<?php
// Database info
$dbhost = 'localhost';
$dbuser = 'db_user';
$dbpass = 'password';
$dbname = 'db_name';
//---------------
header('Content-type: text/plain');
$dbconn = mysql_connect($dbhost, $dbuser, $dbpass) or die( mysql_error() );
$db = mysql_select_db($dbname) or die( mysql_error() );
$sql = 'SHOW TABLES';
$result = mysql_query($sql) or die( mysql_error() );
while ( $row = mysql_fetch_row($result) )
{
$table = mysql_real_escape_string($row[0]);
$sql = "ALTER TABLE $table DEFAULT CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE
utf8_general_ci";
mysql_query($sql) or die( mysql_error() );
print "$table changed to UTF-8.\n";
}
mysql_close($dbconn);
?>
If course, you can adjust the ALTER TABLE statement to any character set
and collation that you need.
Enjoy folks
