convert utf8 characters using PHP or MySQL

Question

I'm not sure if someone has asked this question before or not but I didn't find any. While I hadn't set connection charset in PDO and table collation was utf8_percian_ci , so all data has been stored in unreadable characters like سلام that is سلام in Persian.

Before setting charset by adding mysql:charset=utf8mb4; to PDO DNS I was able to retrieve all data correctly but now I see سلام instead of سلام in browser.

My website is a blog and now it seems I have to reenter all the texts and posts and then restore them to be saved correctly. That's a disaster!

I used mb_detect_encoding() for both سلام & سلام and found out that both of them are UTF-8. This is so funny to search "How to convert utf8 to utf8 ?" and absolutely I get no expected result.

Is there anyway to convert سلام to سلام using MySQL ? If not, I thought another way could be using PHP to read old data then convert and insert into database again.

What should I do ?

Answer 1

You can simply do:

UPDATE my_table SET my_column = BINARY CONVERT(my_column USING latin1)

(where latin1 is the character set in which your connection was set at the time of insertion).