Re: [tlug] unable to create local copy utf8 encoded Japanese MySQLdata [SOLVED]

[Dave Gutteridge <dave@example.com>]

Stephen,

>Anyway, I'll go out on a limb and say I think you're wrong.  It *is*
>probably an issue of converting the character entities and other
>mojibake back into Unicode. 
>
Fortunately, I got a nice simple solution from someone on the Ubuntu 
list. I must say though, that advice I got here led me to ask the right 
questions on the MySQL list, which in turn led me to ask the right 
questions on the Ubuntu list. It's great to have so many helpful 
communities on hand for assistance. And as a bonus the solution was nice 
and easy to implement.

The problem was one of MySQL system variables, as described here:
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/4.1/en/charset-server.html

And the solution was to edit /etc/mysql/my.cnf, locate the section that 
starts [mysqld], and add these lines under it:
# utf8
init-connect='SET NAMES utf8'
character-set-server=utf8
collation-server=utf8_general_ci

I restarted MySQL after that, and low and behold, all the Japanese 
displays correctly, regardless of whether or not it was HTML entities or 
readable Japanese characters.

Thanks to everyone for their helpful advice, which has helped me a lot 
in understanding encoding better.

--
Dave M G