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