Convert a MySQL database from latin to UTF-8

Question

I am converting a website from ISO to UTF-8, so I need to convert the MySQL database too.

On the Internet, I read various solutions, I don't know wich one to choose.

Do I really need to convert my varchar columns to binary, then to UTF-8 like that:

ALTER TABLE t MODIFY col BINARY(150);
ALTER TABLE t MODIFY col CHAR(150) CHARACTER SET utf8;

It takes a long time to do that for each column, of each table, of each database.

I have 10 databases, with 20 tables each, wich around 2 - 3 varchar colums (2 queries each column), this gives me around 1000 queries to write! How come? How to do?

Resolved : I post the code that I have used:

PASSWORD=""
db=$1

mysqldump --password=$PASSWORD --set-charset --skip-set-charset --add-drop-table --databases "$db" > /home/dev/backup/bdd.sql

QUERY="ALTER DATABASE \`$db\` DEFAULT CHARACTER SET utf8;"
mysql --password=$PASSWORD --database "$db" -e "$QUERY"

mysql --password=$PASSWORD --default-character-set=utf8 < /home/dev/backup/bdd.sql

See answer below for more information.

Answer 1

You can do that very easily using a dump. Make a dump using

mysqldump --skip-opt --set-charset --skip-set-charset 

Then create another database, set its default character set to UTF-8 and then load your dump back with:

mysql --default-character-set=<your iso encoding>

The main idea is to make a dump without any sign of data encoding.
So, at create time, the table's encoding would be inherit from the database encoding and set to UTF-8. And with --default-character-set we tell MySQL to recode our data automatically.