Making some progress with the database

Well I’ve spent the last 2 days creating some of the various database tables and importing some data for publishers and series (aka titles) from an external source. This proved trickier than expected due to the source of the data containing non-ASCII characters such as curly quotes, accented characters, ellipses, etc. (see my previous post on my Tumblr).

Ended up dropping the whole database after exporting the table definitions and some of the reference type data that I had entered via phpMyAdmin. Then I recreated the database using UTF8 as the character set. Still had some minor tool issues with the mysql command line program – using this to get the data into the MySQL database. What ended up fixing it was using the –default-character-set option to mysql.

mysql --default-character-set utf8 -u USERID -p cb_upc_db < data.sql