Loading utf-8 encoded text into MySQL table

I have a large CSV file that I am going to load it into a MySQL table. However, these data are encoded into utf-8 format, because they include some non-english characters. I have already set the character set of the corresponding column in the table to utf-8. But when I load my file. the non-english characters turn into weird characters(when I do a select on my table rows). Do I need to encode my data before I load the into the table? if yes how Can I do this. I am using Python to load the data and using LOAD DATA LOCAL INFILE command. thanks

Solution 1:

Try

LOAD DATA INFILE 'file'
IGNORE INTO TABLE table
CHARACTER SET UTF8
FIELDS TERMINATED BY ';'
OPTIONALLY ENCLOSED BY '"'
LINES TERMINATED BY '\n'

Solution 2:

as said in http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/load-data.html, you can specify the charset used by your CSV file with the "CHARACTER SET" optional parameter of LOAD DATA LOCAL INFILE

Solution 3:

Do not need encode your characters in the file, but you need to make sure that your file is encoding at UTF-8 before load this file to database.

Solution 4:

You should send

init_command = 'SET NAMES UTF8'
use_unicode = True
charset = 'utf8'

when doing MySQLdb.connect() e.g.

dbconfig = {}
dbconfig['host']            = 'localhost'
dbconfig['user']            = ''
dbconfig['passwd']          = ''
dbconfig['db']              = ''
dbconfig['init_command']    = 'SET NAMES UTF8'
dbconfig['use_unicode']     = True
dbconfig['charset']         = 'utf8'

conn = MySQLdb.connect(**dbconfig)

edit: ah, sorry, I see you've added that you're using "LOAD DATA LOCAL INFILE" -- this wasn't clear from your initial question :)