CODEWITHSUNDEEP
mysqlutf-8typo3
RDAxRoadkill
RDAxRoadkill

Reputation: 464

Is it safe to update tables from latin1 to utf8

Whilst doing some checking for a client to see if their site was still functioning well I found a random page that contained a bunch of weird characters like ¿½.

I think this has to do with the tables having a latin1 encoding instead of utf-8. But seeing as no other pages are affected that use the same table could there be another error. I did check if the text itself was safe and making sure it was just clean text.

So I have 2 questions, the main one being is it safe to just update this one table to utf8 and if not what causes this error and wondered why would this only affects one certain page. (Side note the website is built using typo3)
Ofcourse I have live example's the links are:
Site 1: With weird text characters
Site 2: Same table, but no weird characters

Upvotes: 1

Views: 208

Answers (1)

deceze
deceze

Reputation: 522109

Ultimately the client connecting to the database decides how their encodings are handled; that's known as the connection encoding. Whatever encoding the text is stored as in MySQL, it will be converted on the fly to/from the client's connection encoding. As such, just changing the underlying column's storage to utf8 doesn't affect anything.

However, that in itself also won't "fix" anything. The characters will still be garbage. You'll also have to convert the actual characters to the correct data. Otherwise you'll just have "¿½" stored encoded as utf8 instead of "¿½" stored encoded as latin1. And changing those characters will likely affect any other client which has been doing it wrong so far, so the client side needs to be fixed at the same time.

Upvotes: 1

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