Weird characters after mysqldump export and import on new server

This blog post is pretty old. Be careful with the information you find in here. It's likely dead, dying, or wildly inaccurate.

The other day I had to migrate a WordPress database from one server to the other. I used mysqldump to export the SQL and data from the old server.

Then I used this to import mysql -uusername -ppassword database < backup.sql

This went fine, but I found I was seeing weird characters in the front end and through phpmysqladmin. The “Collation” on both tables seemed the same.

Then I stumbled on a website that offered this change when importing

mysql -uusername -ppassword --default-character-set=utf8 database < backup.sql

That fixed my troubles… now on to more important things.