How to change all the tables in my database to UTF8 character set?

Question

My database is not in UTF8, and I'd like to convert all the tables to UTF8, how can I do this?

Thank you.

Answer 1

mysqldump --user=username --password=password --default-character-set=latin1 --skip-set-charset dbname > dump.sql
sed -r 's/latin1/utf8/g' dump.sql > dump_utf.sql
mysql --user=username --password=password --execute="DROP DATABASE dbname; CREATE DATABASE dbname CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci;"
mysql --user=username --password=password --default-character-set=utf8 dbname < dump_utf.sql

Answer 2

See this: Turning mysql data into utf8

Answer 3

For single table you can do something like this:

ALTER TABLE tab CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci;

For the whole database I don't know other method than similar to this:

http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/view/1575/convert-all-mysql-tables-and-fields-to-utf8