Re: Converting to UTF-8 without shell access

[Rick James]

Test before production -- Yes, that is a good idea. Even if it is just another copy of the data in another database on the same server. Converting from latin1 to utf8 may be reversible, but if you do something wrong, you could have a mess that is really hard to undo.

CREATE DATABASE try;
CREATE TABLE x LIKE main_db.main_table;
INSERT INTO x SELECT * FROM main_db.main_table;

That should give you a copy of one table. Then you can try one of the conversion techniques. To see what you have apply the HEX() and CHAR_LENGTH() tests in the web page I mentioned.

If that fails, DROP the database, start over, and try another technique.