[TYPO3-english] UTF-8 wiki - setDBinit

[Jigal van Hemert]

> I once expirienced that
>
> SET NAMES utf8;
> SET CHARACTER SET utf8;
>
> was not enough. It didn't work with these settings and I spent hours
> finding out why. Finally I found those 5 lines which worked OK so I use
> them since.

In some cases those two lines can be too much. If your default database
collation is not one of the utf-8 kinds the second statement will use that
instead.

The following three settings are enough:
- tables and fields in db utf8 character set (and I prefer utf8-general-ci
collation)
- SET NAMES utf8;
- BE forceCharset: utf-8

In case the database tables/fields are latin1 (or any other non-utf8
charset) and there is utf-8 data stored in these tables (you'll see the
well known multi-byte combinations for accented characters in e.g.
phpMyAdmin) I use a small script
(http://www.xs4all.nl/~dcbjht/typo3/db_utf8_fix.zip) to "convert" the
data.

Regards,

-- 
Jigal van Hemert.