How to read the text of an old MediaWiki page from a SQL backup?

Question

I have a SQL backup of an old Wiki page (approx. version 1.16) and would like to reuse the content of some of these pages for a newer project. Instead of reinstalling the complete wiki, I would like to fetch some parts the old content from these SQL files, but I have not found the content pages in my SQL backup. My guess is that page content is stored in "text" table, but this table rows are binary coded, so I'm not able to directly read the content.

Is my guess right that wiki page content is in table "text"? - If yes, how can I read the row content?

Answer 1

Depends on the configuration. The page content might be in the text table (that's the default) or elsewhere . The text table might be binary UTF-8 (default) or a native string. In the first case, just do a conversion ( CONVERT(text.old_text USING utf8) or something like that).