Re: Fixing Double Enocoding With mysqldump

[Peter Berry]

Update: I believe using mysqldump as stated will work to fix double encoding, but there is a caveat: it will drop at least some (all?) correctly encoded double byte utf8 characters. In other words, if you have correctly encoded multi-byte utf8 characters anywhere in your database, this is a bad idea.

I believe Rick's Plan A under "Fixing Double Encoding" will handle this better: as he suggests, the final IFNULL() will abort the conversion if the result is not valid utf8. The only downsides are that you have to do this per column and that I believe if you have both double encoded characters and valid utf8 characters in the same value it will also abort leaving the double encodings (this should pretty unusual).

For me, I have hundreds of columns that need to be fixed, so I'm considering an additional step in my original plan to preserve the correctly encoded double byte utf8 characters. I'll post again if I find something simple that works.