atppp’s Blog

Some early WordPress databases use raw Latin1 encoding to represent UTF-8 characters. The following seems to be an O.K. way to convert those databases to native UTF-8 databases (at least it works for me, Mysql 5.0.45):

1. Stop/restrict web service.
2. Dump the database:

   $ mysqldump --default-character-set=latin1 --databases wordpress > m.sql

3. Change encoding settings in m.sql, including table default encoding and client communication encoding:

   $ replace "CHARSET=latin1" "CHARSET=utf8" \
       "SET NAMES latin1" "SET NAMES utf8" < m.sql > m2.sql

4. Import the “converted” sql:

   $ mysql < m2.sql

5. Add the following lines to WordPress wp-config.php

   define('DB_CHARSET', 'utf8');
   define('DB_COLLATE', '');

6. Reopen web service. That’s it.

Note: For future convenience, you might as well change the database default encoding to utf8.

Ref to WordPress documentation for details: here and here.