MySQL and UTF-8

It seems that in the era of smart and conected devices we would have figured out how to do simple tasks such as rendering correctly human readable characters in a computer screen.

I have to admit that today in 2018 I still face problems of character enconding in various programs, programming interfaces and such. Just as I did 20 years ago when I first bought a PC.

Being a non-native english speaker with a different alphabet believe me I struggle every time I see broken characters.

I know it is probably because of my ignorance of what ASCII and UTF8 actually means or how to configure these things but anyway I decided long ago that I am not interested in learning them.

So I just wanted to share a MySQL hint for all those who have touble printing a unicode character from a MySQL database.


CONVERT (`column or data` USING utf8)