Hi,
I'm pretty new to Drupal, and I just backed up a client's site to my localhost on my laptop. I had to temporarily install phpMyAdmin to export the database. When I was there I noticed that all these tables had different character encodings. A bunch were latin1_swedish, some were UTF-8, and then a couple random ones.
When I restored the db locally, I just chose 'Latin1' as the enccoding. I have the site up again on my machine but, perhaps predictably, there are a bunch of screwy characters in places where a ’ or an ñ should be.
Can someone explain the craziness of the character encoding? Is that normal in Drupal?
Also, erm, none of my links work. I was planning on troubleshooting this before I asked for your help but since I'm here, maybe you can tell me anything I should know about migrating Drupal sites.
Thanks a lot.
Comments
In principle, I think that
In principle, I think that all Drupal tables should be encoded as UTF-8 (if someone who knows more than me can correct this, please do so) so you should have chosen that as the encoding.
I've had problems in the past when I used the Fantastico tool to create a Drupal installation - it created some tables in latin1_swedish, as in your example. This isn't noticeable until you start using multibyte languages (Arabic in my case), so in most cases I imagine people just don't realize.
Finally, you should find migration instructions here: http://drupal.org/node/206647