Loe Tech

Its unlikely that this will ever matter in local development, but its good practice to have your environment properly setup.

Dump your database to a file:
$ mysqldump -u root --skip-set-charset project_development > project_development.sql

Note: If you are using MacPorts for your mysql installation, mysqldump will be mysqldump5.

Remove the character sets from the table definitions: (be careful if have the phrase ’ DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1’ in your data it will be removed!)
$ sed 's/ DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1//' project_development.sql

Convert the characters in that file from latin1 to UTF-8 using iconv:
$ iconv -f latin1 -t UTF-8 project_development.sql > project_development_utf8.sql

Drop your existing database and recreate it with the appropriate defaults:
$ mysql -u root --execute="drop database project_development; create database project_development character set utf8 collate utf8_general_ci;"

Repopulate your database with your converted data:
$ mysql -u root project_development < project_development_utf8.sql

Don’t forget to add the encoding to your database.yml!

development:
  adapter: mysql
  database: project_development
  username: root
  password: 
  host: localhost
  encoding: utf8