How to convert control characters in MySQL from latin1 to UTF-8?

While converting a database to UTF-8 I noticed a strange behavior regarding the control characters 0x80-0x9F. For example, 0x92 (right apostrophe) would not get converted to UTF-8 and truncate the rest of the content of a column, using this method:

CREATE TABLE `bar` (
 `content` text
) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1

INSERT INTO bar VALUES (0x8081828384858687898A8B8C8D8E8F909192939495969798999A9B9C9D9E9F);
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.06 sec)

SELECT content FROM bar;
+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| content                                                                         |
+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| €‚ƒ„…†‡‰Š‹ŒŽ‘’“”•–—˜™š›œžŸ                                                 |
+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
1 row in set (0.06 sec)

ALTER TABLE bar CHANGE content content TEXT CHARACTER SET UTF8;
Query OK, 1 row affected, 1 warning (0.06 sec)
Records: 1  Duplicates: 0  Warnings: 1

SHOW WARNINGS;
+---------+------+-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Level   | Code | Message                                                                             |
+---------+------+-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Warning | 1366 | Incorrect string value: '\x80\x81\x82\x83\x84\x85...' for column 'content' at row 1 |
+---------+------+-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
1 row in set (0.06 sec)

SELECT * FROM bar;
+---------+
| content |
+---------+
|         |
+---------+
1 row in set (0.06 sec)

While normally, 0x80-0x9F wouldn't be allowed in Latin1, MySQL seems to handle it differently:


MySQL's latin1 is the same as the Windows cp1252 character set. This means it is the same as the official ISO 8859-1 or IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers A

I'm not certain. I tried to start out be reproducing your problem but the alter worked fine for me.

test > CREATE TABLE `bar` (  `content` text ) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1;  INSERT INTO bar VALUES (0x8081828384858687898A8B8C8D8E8F909192939495969798999A9B9C9D9E9F);
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.02 sec)

Query OK, 1 row affected (0.00 sec)

test > ALTER TABLE bar CHANGE content content TEXT CHARACTER SET UTF8;
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.04 sec)
Records: 1  Duplicates: 0  Warnings: 0

test > select * from bar;
+---------------------------------+
| content                         |
+---------------------------------+
| ����������������������������� |
+---------------------------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

test > set names utf8;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)

test > select * from bar;
+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| content                                                                         |
+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| €‚ƒ„…†‡‰Š‹ŒŽ‘’“”•–—˜™š›œžŸ |
+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

Here's my related char settings

test > show variables like '%char%';
+--------------------------+----------------------------+
| Variable_name            | Value                      |
+--------------------------+----------------------------+
| character_set_client     | utf8                       |
| character_set_connection | utf8                       |
| character_set_database   | latin1                     |
| character_set_filesystem | binary                     |
| character_set_results    | utf8                       |
| character_set_server     | latin1                     |
| character_set_system     | utf8                       |
| character_sets_dir       | /usr/share/mysql/charsets/ |
+--------------------------+----------------------------+

Edit

My char settings before running set names utf8

test > show variables like '%char%';
+--------------------------+----------------------------+
| Variable_name            | Value                      |
+--------------------------+----------------------------+
| character_set_client     | latin1                     |
| character_set_connection | latin1                     |
| character_set_database   | latin1                     |
| character_set_filesystem | binary                     |
| character_set_results    | latin1                     |
| character_set_server     | latin1                     |
| character_set_system     | utf8                       |
| character_sets_dir       | /usr/share/mysql/charsets/ |
+--------------------------+----------------------------+
8 rows in set (0.00 sec)

Version

test > select version();
+-------------------------+
| version()               |
+-------------------------+
| 5.1.41-3ubuntu12.10-log |
+-------------------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

StackExchange Database Administrators Q#10467, answer score: 4