Chat log with kimseong on #mysql regarding character sets.
when you dump data in a latin1 table with MySQL, is it converted by default to utf8?[Read more]
FrankMash: mysqldump? yes it is, but there are options to set it to latin1
kimseong: thanks. I have a table in latin1 that I am planning to dump and then change one field in its structure to be utf8
kimseong: should I dump data in utf8 (default) or specify (latin1) to preserve special chars
FrankMash: alter table can change directly, no need to dump, but backup first anyway
alter table does takes longer than dump/importing in our test
FrankMash: if you data is really stored as latin1, then it does not matter
FrankMash: it gets tricky if data is stored as utf8 in latin1 column
kimseong: thanks. so upon re-importing the data (assuming dump is utf8) will the characters be converted back to the charset specified in the table definition
yes
kimseong: yes that would be …