[mdlug] MySQL Upgrade - latin1 -> utf8??? SOLVED!

[Wojtak, Greg]

-----Original Message-----
From: mdlug-bounces at mdlug.org [mailto:mdlug-bounces at mdlug.org] On Behalf
Of Aaron Kulkis
Sent: Tuesday, April 29, 2008 8:22 AM
To: MDLUG's Main discussion list
Subject: Re: [mdlug] MySQL Upgrade - latin1 -> utf8???

>Wojtak, Greg wrote:
>> I am trying to migrate a bunch of MySQL databases from an old, old
>> Gentoo server running MySQL 4.0.22 to a RHEL server running MySQL
>> 5.0.22.  In the process, we are also migrating from latin1 character
set
>> to utf8.  The database I am working with now is a mediawiki db, and
when
>> I do the standard mysqldump, run iconv on the resulting file, and
then
>> import the database, some of the pages in the wiki won't load until I
do
>> an edit and save.   Even when I do that, single quotes and double
dashes
>> (I presume they are "smart" quotes and one of the longer dashes like
>> what gets generated by Word or OO Writer when you type --) show up as
>> "funky characters."  The database cannot be dumped as utf8 as 4.0
does
>> not support it.  
>> 
>> At this point, I don't know if it is a problem with the database
import
>> process or something with mediawiki.  Does anyone have any ideas on
any
>> anything else I can try?
>
>Work on just dumping and importing the data first.
>
>Once you have done that successfully, THEN work on doing the
>latin-1 => UTF-8 conversion.


It turns out the "special" characters that were not showing up were
Microsoft Word's "smart quotes" and the elongated hyphen that Word turns
a double dash (--) into.  The solution I found worked was to do the
dump, open it up in EditPlus32 (a Windows based text editor) in UTF8
mode, then save it out in ANSI format and send it back to the server for
re-importation (it is too a word, I just invented it).  iconv was too
aware of those special characters to fix them, at least the way I
thought it would, but it turns out EditPlus and Windows are just dumb
enough to get me what I wanted.  :)

Greg Wojtak
The Linux Fix
http://www.thelinuxfix.com/

http://www.yesthatsright.net/