MySQL has used utf8 as an alias for utf8mb3 in previous versions. Since only three bytes are used per character, not the entire Unicode character set is covered. Also, utf8mb3 has been deprecated since MySQL Version 8.0 and will be removed in future versions.

To convert an existing database, the character sets of the following components must be changed:

the database
all tables
all columns with a character set

This script converts the character set of a given database - by default to utf8mb4 with collation utf8mb4_unicode_520_ci.

If an error occurs during the conversion of a table or column, an output with the corresponding SQL command is issued and the program continues.

Usage

python convert.py [-h] [-v] [-s | -V] -H HOST -P PORT -u USER -p PASSWORD -d DATABASE

Options:

-h/--help
-s/--statistics
-V/--validate

Required arguments:

-H/--host HOST
-P/--port PORT
-u/--user USER
-p/--password PASSWORD
-d/--database DATABASE

Optional arguments:

-v/--verbose