Encoding Problem with old entries UTF-8 <-> Latin1

[Agent Orange]

When a new UTF-8 using Wordpress version is used on a database with Latin1-encoded posts, these posts look awful. In my case (german language), the Umlauts and the ß were garbage.
Maybe the Upgrade-Script could convert old entries.

[ryan]

Another approach is to use iconv, it it is available on your system. Dump your database to dbdump and then:

iconv -f iso-8859-1 -t utf-8 < dbdump > dbdump.utf

Restore dbdump.utf.

[matt]

That seems to deal with only a few characters. Is that all that's needed for Latin-1?

[Anne]

No there a lot more characters. The attachment lists only the German special characters, not all people use. Dutch has for example '&iuml;' and '&euml;' and accents on the e, a, i, o etc. Other languages have a '/' through the 'o' (I should learn names of those...). French has also accents and a special 'c' (see Tantek).

[Agent Orange]

Yep, I made the character-array manually and only put the chars I need in there (selfish, yes :). But the array can be easily extended.
If you want me to integrate any changes you may have made to the list into the "official" version on my homepage, send them to janvarwig [at] gmx.net.

[Anne]

This should not be integrated in "your official version", I think Matt wants this in the default build.

[Agent Orange]

That would be even better of course, altough the on-the-fly conversion is hardly an ideal solution.
Not many people have the iconv program, I also doubt that everybody running wordpress is familiar with such tools or even able to dump his DB.

[Anne]

Yeah encoding sucks. WP should have a unchangeable default of UTF-8.

[matt]

There's not a whole lot we can do here, the charset is much bigger than what this covers.

[downloadbook]

Nothing.