Charset Converter

This project contains a spellbinding PHP script that converts a MySQL database with a latin1 charset to utf8. It's perfect for those pesky legacy projects with extensive Unicode characters that have been stored improperly due to the latin1 charset.

Problem

Recently, I encountered a legacy project with a MySQL charset of latin1. The project had extensive Unicode characters, but as the charset was latin1, the characters stored in the database appeared as garbled text.

Solution

I concocted a PHP script to transfigure the latin1 charset to utf8, and as if by magic, all the Unicode characters were displayed perfectly in both the database and the application.

How to Use

To run the converter, simply execute the following command:

php converter.php

TODO

This converter only works for all the tables and columns for the connected database, the plan is to make it customizable so that custom table or column input would work and to make it workable with most of the databases.