This is the english translation of an article in my german blog. This article, like the german original, is licensed CC-BY-SA. The english translation has been kindly provided by Tobias Klausmann.

Recently, I had to explain this to several people, hence a writeup for the blog for easier reference. The question: I have content in my database that can be sucessfully read and written by my application, but if I do a mysqldump to transfer the data to a new system, all the non-ASCII characters like Umlauts are destroyed. This happens if you save data to a DB with the wrong text encoding label.

In MySQL, every string has a label that describes the character encoding the string was written in (and should be interpreted in). The string …

Morning, I saw Monty's post asking for contribution to drizzle's i18n efforts. I did checked out Hindi language and well I must say translation is a fun activity. 
If you think that will be as easy as using some online translation tool (I tried Google Translate), you may be wrong. Many sentences that make direct sense in English get completely screwed when translated word by word. Sometimes they are translated into a perfect meaningful sentence and that is when you can laugh out loudly.
As of now I'm doing Hindi (already 80 translations down) and next I'm gonna pick Punjabi. Wow! I know languages.

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Ex-web.de Colleague Markus asked me: QUOTE:Because ... we are now changing dedicated server providers, I have already updated the Gentoo base system. Since as we are already changing everything, we might as well now migrate from MySQL 4 to 5.

So my question is: Shall I be switching from latin1 to utf8? Or should I be staying with latin1? I have been writing a german language article on character sets in MySQL and this is the translation of it.

Continue reading "Handling character sets"