Creating utf-8 tables in symfony 1.4 /doctrine 1.2

Recently I had an issue on one of my work websites where the database schema was setup in Latin-1 encoding, this was fine till the encoding of the website was also set to iso-8859-1 and nothing fancy was going on. However later in the last few months, I had been doing some development which required me to change the encoding to utf-8 and that resulted in a lot of issues. Some I am still resolving. One of the two solutions that we came up was assign it a custom function for ‘escaping_strategy’, which however wasn’t the silver bullet to fix as there was more crazy code that was getting raw value from the model and hence our function would get by passed. I am still looking for better ways of fixing it (seems very likely a case of massive re-factoring required) however, this one tip was handy.

If you want to create an individual table to be utf-8 then in the schema.yml you can add.

User:
  options:
    type: MyISAM
    collate: utf8_unicode_ci
    charset: utf8
  columns:
    username: string(255)
    password: string(255)

However this can be a painful repetitive task, especially if you have loads and loads of tables to work with. In case you are like me and prefer all your tables to be utf-8 by default, you can add this function to your ProjectConfiguration.class.php file.

  public function configureDoctrine(Doctrine_Manager $manager)
  {
    $manager->setCollate('utf8_unicode_ci');
    $manager->setCharset('utf8');
  }

and then rebuild all the models (and possibly load your fixtures if you have any.

# symfony doctrine:build --all --and-load --env=dev --no-confirmation

Obviously bare in mind that this will drop your database and re-create the tables with utf-8 encoding.

If anyone has any suggestions for my problem, do leave a comment.