Convert output of MySQL query to utf8

Question

I have a table in my database and I want run a query like

SELECT column1, column2 FROM my_table WHERE my_condition; 

but I want the mysql to return the column2 in utf8 encoding. Is it any function in mysql to do such task? What is that?

Answer 1

You can use CAST and CONVERT to switch between different types of encodings. See: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/charset-convert.html

SELECT column1, CONVERT(column2 USING utf8) FROM my_table  WHERE my_condition;