Title: Advice on database encoding
Last modified: August 22, 2016

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# Advice on database encoding

 *  [hotbelgo](https://wordpress.org/support/users/hotbelgo/)
 * (@hotbelgo)
 * [11 years ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/advice-on-database-encoding/)
 * I want to export and reimport all my posts and pages in order to clear the database
   out of cruft, and I also want to make a copy for development purposes on localhost.
   However, all of my efforts end up struggling with weird characters in the posts.
   My site has been running for a long time and soehow got built on latin1_swedish_ci(
   see [screenshot](https://www.dropbox.com/s/znhfageoe8hnog6/Screenshot%20from%202015-03-13%2012%3A49%3A25.png?dl=0))
   despite it being entirely in english.
 * How can I (safely) change the database so that it is more easily transferable
   to another site. I’m thinking utf8 would be better.

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)

 *  [Matt Knowles](https://wordpress.org/support/users/aestheticdesign/)
 * (@aestheticdesign)
 * [11 years ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/advice-on-database-encoding/#post-5895230)
 * If you have access to phpMyAdmin, you can specify the character set of the export
   file.
 * In export, you need to select the custom option to see that option.
 *  Thread Starter [hotbelgo](https://wordpress.org/support/users/hotbelgo/)
 * (@hotbelgo)
 * [11 years ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/advice-on-database-encoding/#post-5895324)
 * Thanks – I could not find a successful way to export. (But bizarrely, I just 
   tried exporting the posts using wordpress’ exporter and I was able to import 
   nicely). That’s ultimately my goal, so as to lose all the database mess that 
   accumulates over 8 years, so i feel like i’m going in the right direction

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)

The topic ‘Advice on database encoding’ is closed to new replies.

## Tags

 * [character encoding](https://wordpress.org/support/topic-tag/character-encoding/)
 * [utf8](https://wordpress.org/support/topic-tag/utf8/)

 * In: [Fixing WordPress](https://wordpress.org/support/forum/how-to-and-troubleshooting/)
 * 2 replies
 * 2 participants
 * Last reply from: [hotbelgo](https://wordpress.org/support/users/hotbelgo/)
 * Last activity: [11 years ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/advice-on-database-encoding/#post-5895324)
 * Status: not resolved

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