Converting mysql db to unicode
mysqldump --user=username --password=password --default-character-set=latin1 --skip-set-charset dbname > dump.sql chgrep latin1 utf8 dump.sql (OR) sed -r 's/latin1/utf8/g' dump.sql > dump_utf.sql mysql --user=username --password=password --execute="DROP DATABASE dbname; CREATE DATABASE dbname CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci;" mysql --user=username --password=password --default-character-set=utf8 dbname < dump.sql