I knew at some point, given the amount of Japanese interspersed with English on my various sites, I would need to change the Latin-1 encoding of my MySQL database (say that five times fast) to UTF-8. It hasn’t been much of an issue because when I display that text on a web site, I send UTF-8 encoding in the header.<\/p>\n
I reached a breaking point when with trying to sort a text field with mixed languages. Because the database was encoded in Latin-1, the multibyte strings were sorted as single-byte strings. On a web page, that meant Japanese text would appear in the middle of the sort.<\/p>\n
Well, I finally did a Google search<\/a> on what it takes to perform a Latin-1-to-UTF-8 conversion<\/a>. So long as your data is fairly clean, it takes about four commands in a shell prompt to finish. And that’s what I did — I dumped my database, converted it and loaded it into an empty server to see the results. I liked what I saw in phpMyAdmin. Hastily, I decided to forge ahead and do a real conversion.<\/p>\n Imagine my surprise when I reloaded my websites and saw question marks where there should have been Japanese text.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n After a failed attempt to roll back my database, I did a bit more searching and discovered I needed to send a "Set Names utf8" query to the MySQL server before performing any other queries. Thankfully, that was just a single line to add in my self-written toolkit, which powers this site and others.<\/p>\n That wasn’t the case with Movable Type, however. The question marks showed up in the administration interface. A bit more searching<\/a> revealed the "SQLSetNames 1<\/a>" configuration value in Had I been diligent, I would have done some work in my development environment before going half-cocked into a database conversion. Instead, I ended up panicking for a full hour trying to get my sites fixed. At the end of it, I was quite pleased when I saw Japanese text sorted separately from English.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Imagine my surprise when I reloaded my websites and saw question marks where there should have been Japanese text.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-219","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technophilia-professional"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4Bkjq-3x","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/sakufu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/219","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/sakufu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/sakufu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/sakufu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/sakufu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=219"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/sakufu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/219\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/sakufu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=219"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/sakufu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=219"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/sakufu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=219"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}mt-config.cgi<\/code>. Question marks gone.<\/p>\n