MySqlBulkLoader and Unicode Data

Question

I am currently trying to use MySqlBulkLoader in a .NET application for adding Unicode and UTF8 formatted data. My Code does the following

• writes a tab delimited text file using a TextWriter and Stream writer

  using (TextWriter tr = new StreamWriter(newFile, false, Encoding.UTF8))

• Opens the MySqlBulkLoader using a connection string with Charset=utf8; at the end

  MySqlBulkLoader bl = new MySqlBulkLoader(new MySqlConnection(mysqlconnstring));

• BL has a character set to UTF8

  bl.CharacterSet = "utf8";

• Then I call bl.Load();

but when i check the DB, i am getting ? for Unicode characters... I have checked the Text file i am writing to, and the characters are showing correctly.

I have tried setting the Collation of the Database and table to utf8_bin, based on [this question1 but i am still getting ?... What am i doing wrong?

Answer 1

Right... Even after setting the Collation of the tables, it made no difference, but you do need to set the charset of the table itself... I did the following...

ALTER TABLE tablename CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci;

and it worked! happy days!