Fixing broken UTF-8 handling with MySQL driver

Felix Zandanel felix at zandanel.me
Mon Mar 23 11:51:42 UTC 2015


> Am 12.03.2015 um 14:55 schrieb Timo Sirainen <tss at iki.fi>:
> 
> On 11 Mar 2015, at 21:31, Felix Zandanel <felix at zandanel.me> wrote:
>> 
>> Although my MySQL installation is set up to use UTF-8 as the default charset on every level (config, database, table and field), and the character_set_* runtime variables all yield the value "utf8", it still seems that the mysql client library must be instructed to actually use UTF-8 explicitly. Adding the following statement to driver_mysql_connect() fixes the issue for me:
>> 
>> mysql_options(db->mysql, MYSQL_SET_CHARSET_NAME, "utf8");
> 
> I think you can also add to /etc/my.cnf :
> 
> [client]
> default-character-set = utf8

Sorry for the late reply. You were so right, that simple line did the trick. My fault, I didn't read the whole charset documentation of MySQL. It's a shame that UTF-8 isn't the default setting.

Anyway, as dovecot's internals expect all input strings to be UTF-8, wouldn't it be useful to enforce UTF-8 in the database drivers? Using anything else than ASCII / UTF-8 for dovecot's MySQL connections doesn't really make sense, I think. Also, a "default-character-set = utf8" line in my.cnf is a system wide configuration, which might break other software interacting with MySQL—in theory.


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