Fun with MySQL and WordPress

Spent a few hours tugging with the WordPress database.  It seemed like a good time to move the database into a more recent version of MySQL.

It should have been pretty easy.  Create the new  table space, define, and load the tables.  Tell WP where to look for the data base, and done. A snap, right?

Not so fast SQL-breath! All of the data appeared to load properly, and WP came up as it should.  The problem was some junk data interspersed within the text of most every post.

Here was the tricky part.  I generally use Notepad++ for general plain test editing. It is a really nice programmer’s text editor.   But it wasn’t displaying the junk characters embedded within the text. Grrrrr.

But Notepad++ can also convert the text files code type from ASCII to UTF, etc, etc.   From one platform to another, sometimes “plain text” turns out to be not so plain.  But by using the various different text encoding formats, I was finally able to display the junk data. And get rid of it.

After that, everything looks pretty good now.  Also settled on the google translation widget.  Folks seemed to use it more often, and I’ve been told it gives the more useful translations.