My Thoughts

I just converted the WordPress database to UTF-8. It turned out when I create a database on my hosting website it defaults to latin1. The conversion was pretty easy in just a few steps.

These are the steps I took.

1. Export the database. I used phpMyadmin and just ran an export to a file name mine.sql
2. To convert the data in the database I ran : iconv -f ISO-8859-1 -t utf8 mine.sql > mine-utf8.sql

(iconv was installed on my Linux box)

3. Opened the mine-utf8.sql in VI and ran: %s/CHARSET=latin1/CHARSET=utf8/
4. Created a new database with the UTF-8 settings.
5. Added the appropriate rights for the new database to the existing MySQL user I use for WordPress.
6. Imported the data int the new database using the mine-utf8.sql file.
7. Changed wp-config.php to use the new database.

And that was it.

Of course you could drop the existing database and create it as UTF-8 but I rather had a security in case the conversion didn’t work.

Tags: charset, conversion, latin, Linux, MySQL, utf 8, WordPress

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 22nd, 2008 at 11:49 pm and is filed under This Website, WordPress.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.