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Collation for Multilanguage site

Discussion in 'Databases' started by PaIntR, Jul 25, 2013.

0
  1. #1
    Hi there,
    I have a website with a huge MySQL database, and the website is currently running in English. Therefore, we had the Collation of our text/varchar fields on "latin1_swedish_ci" so far. That worked well, but now we have a problem: we've translated the website in over 10 languages now, one of them is Russian. So the russian (and other languages with other charsets) people can't save text in the database in their own language, because then it will save their characters as "?". I noticed that if I change the field collation to "utf8_bin", it works for the russian characters aswell.

    Now, my question is:
    If I change all my field Collations to "utf8_bin" (knowing that my code is in Utf-8 aswell), will that have any negative effects? What could it change that I wouldn't like? And finally, would it solve the problem?
     
    PaIntR, Jul 25, 2013 IP
  2. jestep

    jestep Prominent Member

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    #2
    Normally you are fine going from latin1 to utf8, not so much the other direction. Sometimes there are some character conversion problems. Make sure to do a full back up your data as it currently is just in case.

    Also, you can also do a full data backup and import the data into new UTF8 tables and it should definitely work.
     
    jestep, Jul 25, 2013 IP