[TYPO3-english] How can I convert my database to utf8?

[Jörg Klein]

Hi Jigal,

I like Windows Live Mail: It sends mails after I did not press "Send", but 
after I pressed "Send later". Great. So here we go.

"Jörg Klein" <joerg at klein-family.com> schrieb im Newsbeitrag 
news:mailman.1.1275528474.13822.typo3-english at lists.typo3.org...
>
>> Furthermore, if you use the following settings in the Install Tool you 
>> should have a UTF-8 installation:
>>
>> $TYPO3_CONF_VARS['SYS']['setDBinit'] = 'SET NAMES utf8;';
>> $TYPO3_CONF_VARS['BE']['forceCharset'] = 'utf-8';
>
> I just tried that and it works! Thank you so much!

My problem arose from another setting in 
$TYPO3_CONF_VARS['SYS']['setDBinit'].
My provider wrote that the following should be set there:
$TYPO3_CONF_VARS['SYS']['setDBinit'] = 'SET NAMES utf8;\'.chr(10).\
'SET CHARACTER SET utf8;\'.chr(10).\
'SET SESSION character_set_server=utf8;';

This causes the question mark blocks in my environment.

> I just tried to understand what exactly your code does:

For the conversion your code temporarily changes the type of some columns: 
char to binary and text to blob.
I never did that. Why is that needed?

Greetings

Jörg