Its unlikely that this will ever matter in local development, but its good practice to have your environment properly setup.
Dump your database to a file:
$ mysqldump -u root --default-character-set=latin1 --skip-set-charset project_development > project_development.sql
Convert the characters in that file from latin1 to UTF-8 using iconv:
$ iconv -f latin1 -t UTF-8 project_development.sql > project_development_utf8.sql
Drop your existing database and recreate it with the appropriate defaults:
$ mysql -u root --execute="drop database project_development; create database project_development character set utf8 collate utf8_general_ci;"
Repopulate your database with your converted data:
$ mysql -u root project_development < project_development_utf8.sql
Don’t forget to add the encoding to your database.yml!
adapter: mysql
database: project_development
username: root
password:
host: localhost
encoding: utf8
