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. The Times They Are A-Changin'

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.