Shami's Blog

I have recently faced an issue while migrating MySQL to a new server where non-English characters show up as gibberish. This was because UTF-8 text was saved in columns encoded as latin1. The solution is simple, convert the field into a BLOB and then back to text with the required type and encoding.

Sometimes you need to do that multiple times, if you do, you need to convert the table back to latin1 and then do the procedure again

ALTER TABLE _TABLE MODIFY _TABLE.field BLOB;
ALTER TABLE _TABLE MODIFY _TABLE.field VARCHAR(200) CHARACTER SET utf8;

/* if you have to do this a second time*/
ALTER TABLE _TABLE MODIFY _TABLE.field VARCHAR(200) CHARACTER SET latin1;
ALTER TABLE _TABLE MODIFY _TABLE.field BLOB;
ALTER TABLE _TABLE MODIFY _TABLE.field VARCHAR(200) CHARACTER SET utf8;