I'm storing strings on a Mysql database.
Some of the strings have single quotes which then get stored like this:
People’s
Is this the proper way to store these strings or should I set a different mysql collation?
I have tried the following without luck....
utf8_general_ci
latin1_swedish_ci
Where are you setting the collation? You should be using UTF-8 in three places:
as the collation of each row that contains character data. You can set the default collation for the table or database so that new columns pick it up, but if you already have a table, ALTERing its default collation doesn't change the collation of the existing rows.
as the encoding of the connection between your application and MySQL. This can be set manually using the SET NAMES statement, or, better, with the suitable API call for your environment (for example mysql_set_charset() in PHP, or the charset argument to connect() in Python MySQLdb).
in your output. For example if producing a web page, by using the Content-Type: text/html;charset=utf-8 header/meta.
You can store the string "People’s" as UTF-8-hidden-in-Latin-1 "People’s" by using Latin-1 throughout, since you'll still get the same bytes out as you put in. But that way you won't get sensible results from ordering or case-insenstive-comparisons of non-ASCII characters.
Related
I need to convert latin1 charset of a table to utf8.
Quoting from mysql docs:
The CONVERT TO operation converts column values between the original and named character sets. This is not what you want if you have a column in one character set (like latin1) but the stored values actually use some other, incompatible character set (like utf8mb4). In this case, you have to do the following for each such column:
ALTER TABLE t1 CHANGE c1 c1 BLOB;
ALTER TABLE t1 CHANGE c1 c1 TEXT CHARACTER SET utf8mb4;
This answer shows how to find out charset at DB level, table level, and column level. But I need to find out the charset of the actual stored values. How can I do that?
Since my connector/j jdbc connection string doesn't specify any characterEncoding or connectionCollation properties, it is possible that it used utf8 by default to store the values, in which case I don't need any conversion, just change the table metadata.
mysql-connector-java version: 8.0.22
mysql database version: 5.6
spring boot version: 2.5.x
The character set of the string in a given column should be the same as the column definition.
There have been cases where people accidentally store the bytes of the wrong encoding in a column. For example, they store bytes of a latin1 encoding in a utf8 field. This is a terrible idea, because queries can't tell the difference. Those bytes may not be valid values of the column's defined encoding, and this results in garbage data. Cleaning up a table where some of the strings are stored in the wrong encoding is an unpleasant chore.
So I strongly urge you to store only strings encoded in a compatible way according to the column's definition, and to assume that all strings are stored this way.
To answer the title:
SHOW CREATE TABLE tablename shows the detault charset for the table and any overrides for individual columns.
Don't blindly use CONVERT TO, especially the 2-step ALTER you are showing. Let's see what is in the table now (SELECT col, HEX(col) ... for something with accented text.
See Trouble with UTF-8 characters; what I see is not what I stored for the main 4 types of problems.
This gives several cases and how to fix them. http://mysql.rjweb.org/doc.php/charcoll#fixes_for_various_cases
One case involves using CONVERT TO; two other cases involve using BLOB or VARBINARY.
I need to implement a sorted SELECT, on a specific encoding of a field, without CONVERT.
That is, normally I'd do it by
SELECT * FROM table ORDER BY CONVERT(field USING gbk) COLLATE gbk_chinese_ci
However for some reason CONVERT was not allowed. As a result, I tried to approach this by
ALTER TABLE table MODIFY field VARCHAR(xx) CHARACTER SET gbk COLLATE gbk_chinese_ci;
SELECT * FROM table ORDER BY field
It works. That's good. However I'm worried about encoding problems.
Connection to the MySQL server includes the parameters characterEncoding=utf8 and useUnicode=true. I couldn't yet find the explanation of these params in MySQL's official document, but I suppose these ensure that the communications between the client and the server should be in utf-8.
That brings the question. Does MySQL server implicitly convert data in utf-8 to gbk when it receives the data? Do the GET params only define the charset of communication rather than that of the final stored data?
Edit
Comments say that the server does convert them! Thanks guys!
My further confusion is that, only one of the fields is set to use gbk, while everything else has been left to use utf8. That means the server's charset should still be utf8 globally but gbk locally for that field only.
Suppose now I fire this line of script to the server
INSERT INTO table (field_gbk, field_utf8) VALUES ("a", "b");
Does the server:
Receive the whole statement in utf8;
Convert only "a" to gbk and stores it; and
Stores "b" as-is to the database?
Many thanks guys!
Yes.
You specify the encoding of in the client when you connect.
You specify the encoding ("Character set") of the column you are Inserting into.
MySQL converts from one encoding to the other as it INSERTs the rows. Similarly, it converts the other way when SELECTing.
The CONVERT function should not (normally) be used for anything.
You are using Java? characterEncoding=utf8 and useUnicode=true is what it uses for declaring the client side.
"gbk" for a single column? Find. That column will handled differently than other columns.
I am about to undertake the tedious and gotcha-laden task of converting a database from Latin1 to UTF-8.
At this point I simply want to check what sort of data I have stored in my tables, as that will determine what approach I should use to convert the data.
Specifically, I want to check if I have UTF-8 characters in the Latin1 columns, what would be the best way to do this? If only a few rows are affected, then I can just fix this manually.
Option 1. Perform a MySQL dump and use Perl to search for UTF-8 characters?
Option 2. Use MySQL CHAR_LENGTH to find rows with multi-byte characters?
e.g. SELECT name FROM clients WHERE LENGTH(name) != CHAR_LENGTH(name);
Is this enough?
At the moment I have switched my Mysql client encoding to UTF-8.
Character encoding, like time zones, is a constant source of problems.
What you can do is look for any "high-ASCII" characters as these are either LATIN1 accented characters or symbols, or the first of a UTF-8 multi-byte character. Telling the difference isn't going to be easy unless you cheat a bit.
To figure out what encoding is correct, you just SELECT two different versions and compare visually. Here's an example:
SELECT CONVERT(CONVERT(name USING BINARY) USING latin1) AS latin1,
CONVERT(CONVERT(name USING BINARY) USING utf8) AS utf8
FROM users
WHERE CONVERT(name USING BINARY) RLIKE CONCAT('[', UNHEX('80'), '-', UNHEX('FF'), ']')
This is made unusually complicated because the MySQL regexp engine seems to ignore things like \x80 and makes it necessary to use the UNHEX() method instead.
This produces results like this:
latin1 utf8
----------------------------------------
Björn Björn
Since your question is not completely clear, let's assume some scenarios:
Hitherto wrong connection: You've been connecting to your database incorrectly using the latin1 encoding, but have stored UTF-8 data in the database (the encoding of the column is irrelevant in this case). This is the case I described here. In this case, it's easy to fix: Dump the database contents to a file through a latin1 connection. This will translate the incorrectly stored data into incorrectly correctly stored UTF-8, the way it has worked so far (read the aforelinked article for the gory details). You can then reimport the data into the database through a correctly set utf8 connection, and it will be stored as it should be.
Hitherto wrong column encoding: UTF-8 data was inserted into a latin1 column through a utf8 connection. In that case forget it, the data is gone. Any non-latin1 character should be replaced by a ?.
Hitherto everything fine, henceforth added support for UTF-8: You have Latin-1 data correctly stored in a latin1 column, inserted through a latin1 connection, but want to expand that to also allow UTF-8 data. In that case just change the column encoding to utf8. MySQL will convert the existing data for you. Then just make sure your database connection is set to utf8 when you insert UTF-8 data.
There is a script on github to help with this sort of a thing.
I would create a dump of the database and grep for all valid UTF8 sequences. Where to take it from there depends on what you get. There are multiple questions on SO about identifying invalid UTF8; you can basically just reverse the logic.
Edit: So basically, any field consisting entirely of 7-bit ASCII is safe, and any field containing an invalid UTF-8 sequence can be assumed to be Latin-1. The remaining data should be inspected - if you are lucky, a handful of obvious substitutions will fix the absolute majority (replace ö with Latin-1 ö, etc).
I noticed today that our database uses character set "utf8 -- UTF-8 Unicode" and collation "utf8_general_ci" but most of the tables and columns inside are using CHARSET=latin1. Will I run into any problems with this?
The reason I ask is because we have been running into a lot of problems syncing data between two database.
For an overview of MySQL character sets, read for example http://mysqldump.azundris.com/archives/60-Handling-character-sets.html
The server, a schema/database and a table have no character sets, they have just defaults that are inherited downwards (server to schema to table). Columns that are of a CHAR, VARCHAR or any TEXT type have character sets, and do so on a per column basis. If no specific character set is defined for them, they inherit from the table.
Inheritance for all these objects happens at object creation time.
The other thing that has a character set is the connection. Since the connection is the collection of things the server knows about the client, the character set of the connection should be set to whatever character set you are using in your client.
MySQL will then correctly convert between the character set of a column and the character set of a connection. Usually there are no problems with that.
The most common problem PEOPLE have with it is lying to the server, that is, setting the character set of a connection to something different from what the client is actually sending or using. This can be done at runtime by sending the command SET NAMES ... as the first thing at connection setup, and it is very important that you specify the correct thing here.
If you do, and for example send latin1 data into a connection that has been SET NAMES latin1, storing data into a latin1 column will not convert data, whereas storing data into a utf8 column will convert your latin1 umlauts (ö = F6) into utf8 umlauts (ö = C3 B6) on disk. Reading will transparently convert back, if the connection is properly set up.
In your setup, if your connection is SET NAMES utf8 and you are sending data to a latin1 column, only data that can be represented in latin1 can be stored. There will be data truncation, and a data truncation warning if you for example try to store japanese hiragana in such a latin1 column.
My experience with messign up MySQL charset was not 100% functional sorting of strings. You would be better with having everything in UTF-8 to be on the safe side.
I think it depends on what you actually store in that columns. If you store UTF-8 multi-byte characters in a column with latin-1 charset you might run into the sorting troubles. But as longs as there are only EN/US characters you should be ok.
You will run into problems if there's a possibility of storing "international" text -- that is, non-latin characters.
If I understand what you 're posting correctly, this means that the default for new tables in your database is UTF-8, but your existing tables use latin-1. That could be a problem. Depends on your data, as mentioned above.
The name Accîdent seems to be different than AccÎdent when I do a database query to update the column. Yet Accîdent and AccÎdent point to the same place...
In MySQL Accîdent = Accîdent when inserted.
Also, AccÎdent = AccÃŽdent.
Do you know why this is?
By default, MySQL assumes the client uses the latin1 character set. If you're using UTF-8 in your PHP scripts, then this assumption is false. You need to specify to MySQL that you're using UTF-8 by issuing this SQL statement just after the database connection is opened:
SET NAMES utf8
Then the data inserted by the following SQL statements will use the correct character set. This means that you need to re-insert your data or follow the MySQL conversion procedure (see the last paragraphs).
It is recommended that your tables are configured to store data in UTF-8, too, to avoid unnecessary read/write character set conversions. That's not required, though.
More information is available in the MySQL documentation. Specifically, Connection Character Sets and Collations.
First, you seem to be storing UTF-8 data in a table of different encoding. MySQL will try and cope, but the side effect is as you see - data in the database will look "weird". When creating a table, you need to specify the character encoding - preferably UTF-8. For existing tables, you'll need to convert the data.
Second, the tables have a "collation" beside encoding. Encoding determines how the characters map to bytes, collation determines sorting and comparison. There are language-specific collations, but utf8_general_ci should be the one you're looking for (ci stands for "case insensitive") - then your two string would match.