Some databases may either be using an old character encoding or mixing diffenent charset, which they want to upgrade or convert to a Unicode Standard.

This example uses the basic utf8, which is encoded on 3bits, it is, however, recommended to use utf8mb4 which is encoded on 4 bits encompassing a more extensive unicode charset.

So in this example, we are changing the latin1 collation
– latin1_swedish_ci => utf8_unicode_ci (or utf8mb4_unicode_ci)
– latin1 => utf8 (or utf8mb4)

Using MySQLDump

First of all, we will use mysqldump to extract a full dump of the database, you may also add:
–skip-set-charset –default-character-set=utf8 to use and set utf8 as the default new character set.
–add-drop-database in order to be able to restore the dump over the top of the existing database.
-u [username] -p your authentication arguments

Don’t forget your authentication arguments -u user -p

Using phpMyAdmin

phpMyAdmin also provides a way to automatically convert the database charset as well as the table and its fields. However this may fail because of foreign key checking, therefore you may need to disable that & convert your data and then re-enable MySQL’s foreign key checks

SET FOREIGN_KEY_CHECKS = 0;
SET GLOBAL FOREIGN_KEY_CHECKS=0;

/* Conversion */

SET FOREIGN_KEY_CHECKS = 1;
SET GLOBAL FOREIGN_KEY_CHECKS=1;