stefan / botzenhart / com

Since I set up a rake task which dumps my production database on the server and pipes it through a ssh connection into my local mysql server I had to recognize encoding problems locally. Today I said to myself: “Stop that encoding foo and get this crappy shit running correctly”

After struggling around with server side and local encodings I found out that the problem was my client connection to my local mysql server. This wasn’t set up with utf8 encoding but with latin1. Googling around some time led me to stackoverflow.

So I added

encoding: utf8
collation: utf8_general_ci

to my database.yml and everything running perfectly now I’m not sure about the correct translation but in Germany we would say: A small leak will sink a great ship.

I’m happy getting this fixed but does anyone know how to set up mysql server on osx to fix this issue without adding the configuration?

More on mysql encodings: http://www.miracee.org/2009/03/30/encoding-handling-mysql-cli-5858398/ (in german, didn’t help but good article)