Re: Some utf8 characters show correctly on one server, but do not on the other

[Jos Smeets]

I'm replying to my own mail. I did some more research on this, e.g. I read http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/4.1/en/charset-conversion.html . This is what I think might have happened:

- I used to store utf8 texts in latin1 columns (MySQL 4.0). Characters were shown correctly, as far as I can remember.
- When my hosting provider upgraded MySQL to 4.1, no conversion of the data was done on their servers.
- I _think_ I did some sort of upgrade on my own server at home, but I don't recall concerting columns from latin1 to BINARY first, then upgrade to 4.1, and then covert BINARY to UTF8 (as described on the page referenced above).

I also read that to get proper utf8 behaviour you need to do a "SET NAMES utf8;" at the beginning of every session. The way I have things set up now, it only shows utf8 characters properly on my site without this command!

As far as I can judge now, I have the following situation:
I have a MySQL 4.1 database with in it utf8 columns, which contain utf characters, but they are not inserted the correct way.

My questions: Do you think my analysis is correct? Am I looking in the right direction? Can I do some sort of upgrade to repair (most of) this?

Jos

(Some day I'll be a character encoding expert...)