How to Convert a Database to UTF-8

The following mini script is used to convert existing database tables to UTF-8. Upload the script to your account as "convert.php" and modify the database connection parameters and the character set, then execute the script.

To execute the script, you simply would visit the script in any web browser. If you upload the file to yourpublic_html folder you'd visit "http://your-domain.com/convert.php".

Don't forget to replace your-domain.com with your actual domain name. Also, to get your languages to work on your site the collation will need to be utf8_general_ci.

Code to convert your database to UTF-8

// Adds the header information
header('Content-type: text/plain');  


// Connects to the MySQL database    
$connection = mysql_connect($db_server, $db_user, $db_password) or die(mysql_error() );      
$db = mysql_select_db($db_name) or die( mysql_error() ); 


// Runs the SQL query on teh database     
$sql = 'SHOW TABLES'; $result = mysql_query($sql) or die( mysql_error() ); 


// Runs a loop that finds all collations within the database and changes it to the new collation    
   while ( $row = mysql_fetch_row($result) )   {   	
      $table = mysql_real_escape_string($row[0]);  
      $sql = "ALTER TABLE $table CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET $char_set COLLATE utf8_general_ci";   	
      mysql_query($sql) or die( mysql_error() );     	
      print "$table changed successfully.\n";  
   }    


// Update the Collation of the database itself  
$sql = "ALTER DATABASE CHARACTER SET $char_set;";  
mysql_query($sql) or die( mysql_error());     
print "Database collation has been updated successfully.\n";     


// close the connection to the database  
mysql_close($connection);     


?>