Umlaut problem in phpMyAdmin

March 9th, 2007

If you have spent weeks searching in google and asking people what the hell happened with the umlaut in phpmyadmin, you might want to consider information below:

Both MySQL 4.0.x and Joomla 1.0.x do not support utf-8 

It is possible to convert the data into single-byte character form (i.e latin1)
in various ways:

• This can be done with phpMyAdmin (newer versions) by defining the connection charset/collation to the new (4.0) database as latin1 with appropriate collation AND defining the source data as utf-8.
• Alternately the sql script file dumped from the original database can be
  loaded into an editor (that recognises encodings) and saved as ASCII instead of utf-8. After this conversion it can be loaded into the target database

It is worthwhile to check how the data looks in the database after the migration by browsing the tables with a tool such as phpmyadmin. Once you are satisfied that the data is looking good then try it in Joomla.

[http://forum.joomla.org/index.php?topic=23075.msg136644]

In my case, I think the problem lies in phpMyAdmin. I use MySQL 4.0.26 and extract the database to a .sql file with the help of EMS SQL Manager 2005. The extracted database contains the correct umlaut character. However, after it is imported by phpMyAdmin to my server, all the german character (ä, ö, ü) and even a simple dash (’-') are transformed into question mark (’?'). My server uses phpMyAdmin 2.9.0.2.

To solve the problem, I chose latin1 for the character set of the file (instead of use the default utf-8) when importing the file. Then, TADA… problem solved!

Meine schöne Umlaute wird endlich da

Entry Filed under: Works