Thanks for your explanation Brion. I didn't get an answer from my hosting provider, I asked them if they encountered a mysql crash or something else and the dump/import all the databases. I don't see another solution than the one I'm doing by hand... 140 rows are affected.
On greek, russian... wikipedias, do you use mysqldump --default-charset=latin1 and did you successfully reimported the dumps ? I'll ask my provider if it's possible to add the --default-charset=latin1 parameter in my automatic weekly dumps, but I'm afraid it couldn't. In PhpMyAdmin and SQLYog (Mysql client), I didn't see such option.
2007/5/4, Brion Vibber brion@wikimedia.org:
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Sylvain Machefert wrote:
Hi Brion, what is strange, is that only the titles are affected, not the content
of
the pages. Is that normal ?
Yes -- the page text is in a binary BLOB field, which will not undergo the bogus lossy conversion.
The summarize, the problem is roughly:
- MediaWiki assumes that MySQL will preserve data that is put into it
- MySQL sometimes corrupts the data
in a little more detail:
- Due to the limitations of MySQL's Unicode support, but default we
continue to treat MySQL fields as binary and store pure UTF-8 Unicode in them, although MySQL may have them listed as Latin-1 depending on your server's defaults.
- The mysqldump backup program by default in 4.1 and later applies a
conversion of non-binary fields to UTF-8, with a marker to have them appropriately converted back when read in.
- This conversion is lossy -- it treats Latin-1 as the Windows-1252 code
page, which is an extension of ISO 8859-1 with additional characters in the 128-159 range which in ISO 8859 and Unicode is supposed to contain non-printing control characters. Four of the code points in this range are not assigned in Windows-1252, and so cannot be converted to UTF-8 Unicode -- these characters are silently corrupted into "?" characters during the conversion if they appear.
- The UTF-8 encoding of Unicode uses the byte values which correspond to
those four non-convertible characters.
- As a result, UTF-8 text in a Latin-1 field may be corrupted, as some
characters are destroyed in the conversion back and forth.
Use the --default-charset=latin1 option on mysqldump when creating your database dumps to avoid this lossy conversion. (And/or find another way to dump/copy databases or another equivalent option to avoid the unnecessary conversion.)
Since it appears that your hosting provider did this for you, you may need to ask them to redo it. Alternatively, you may be able to rig up a statistical fix based on which characters are being corrupted, though I'm not sure how easy that would be.
- -- brion vibber (brion @ wikimedia.org)
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