Whew! Finally I have accomplished what I had been putting off for a while, namely a MySQL upgrade that had been due. Here’s the problem:
What would normally be a straightforward LATIN1 or ISO-8859-1 to UTF-8 character conversion turns out NOT to be. Why? Well, just because the old database character set defaulted to LATIN1, and most things were stored in LATIN1, not everything was. This very website, powered by WordPress, has been storing data as UTF-8 since forever. So we have a problem. Can you see it? The database and its data are mostly LATIN1, but some data are not.
An automated mass conversion would not be possible.
See why I had been putting it off?
The solution, if you can call it a solution, is to convert all the tables that are NOT WordPress first.
Read the rest of this entry »