Collation issue, Is it possible to downgrade/convert from utf8mb4_unicode_ci to utf8_general_ci?

Question

I've been working on a site locally and upon deployment to my client's server I came across the error

MySQL said: Documentation

'#1273 - Unknown collation: 'utf8mb4_unicode_ci'

After a lot of digging I know this is MySQL version related, my local MySQL is 5.5 while the server is 5.1 which does not support utf8mb4_unicode_ci. Unfortunately, there's nothing I can do to upgrade the server's MySQL version.

So my question is, is there anyway I can convert my current database down to something MySQL 5.1 would support?

Answer 1

"Meanwhile", 5.1 has CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci.

This is compatible with utf8mb4 in that utf8 is a subset of utf8mb4. Some Chinese characters, some emoticons, and some other stuff are missing from utf8. Otherwise the two charsets and collations work identically.

utf8mb4 was first added to Version 5.5.3 in March, 2010. Recommend you upgrade.