How to change collation of all rows from latin1_swedish_ci to utf8_unicode_ci?

Question

I ignorantly used the default latin1_swedish_ci character encoding for all of the varchar rows in my database during development and I\'ve determined that this is the root of th

Answer 1

You can actually do this inside MySQL, using a procedure.

Based on https://stackoverflow.com/a/12718767/1612273. It uses the current database, so make sure you're doing it on the right one!

delimiter //

DROP PROCEDURE IF EXISTS convert_database_to_utf8 //

CREATE PROCEDURE convert_database_to_utf8()
BEGIN
    DECLARE table_name VARCHAR(255);
    DECLARE done INT DEFAULT FALSE;

    DECLARE cur CURSOR FOR
        SELECT t.table_name FROM information_schema.tables t WHERE t.table_schema = DATABASE() AND t.table_type='BASE TABLE';
    DECLARE CONTINUE HANDLER FOR NOT FOUND SET done = TRUE;

    OPEN cur;
        tables_loop: LOOP
            FETCH cur INTO table_name;

            IF done THEN
                LEAVE tables_loop;
            END IF;

            SET @sql = CONCAT("ALTER TABLE ", table_name, " CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci");
            PREPARE stmt FROM @sql;
            EXECUTE stmt;
            DROP PREPARE stmt;
        END LOOP;
    CLOSE cur;
END //

delimiter ;
call convert_database_to_utf8();