[LRUG] MySQL/Rails Collation

[Aleksandar Simic]

On Mon, Jan 23, 2012 at 4:56 PM, Andrew Stewart
<boss at airbladesoftware.com> wrote:
> Hola El Rug,
>
> I have a Rails app which started life as Rails 2.x and is now Rails 3.0.y.  It sits on top of a MySQL database.
>
> I have just started to see collation errors both at the Rails level and in the mysql console.  For example:
>
>    mysql> select * from samples where code = 'abcd‐01‐s10‐036';
>    ERROR 1267 (HY000): Illegal mix of collations (latin1_swedish_ci,IMPLICIT) and (utf8_general_ci,COERCIBLE) for operation '='
>
>    mysql> show create table samples;
>    [snip] ENGINE=InnoDB AUTO_INCREMENT=54307 DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1
>
> In the Rails console:
>
>    >> ActiveRecord::Base.connection.collation
>    "latin1_swedish_ci"
>
> Now I thought Rails ensured everything from top to toe was UTF-8; apparently not in this case.  Anyway, how do I best fix this (while staying with MySQL)?

Would this help:

http://alexking.org/blog/2008/03/06/mysql-latin1-utf8-conversion