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Unbelievably, a database dump, when viewed in a UTF-8 mode in a proper editor sometimes still shows incorrect encoding of the dump file!

After done, I had to clear cache, and refresh the page several times before styling started to work correctly.

Even after all of this, your website may still show the Â character, or show international characters incorrectly.

First, check and / or set the encoding of your browser. If it defaults to something other than Unicode (UTF-8), then check your page template header. Recommended encoding setting for the browser is specified in the head of your website's template.

If even when browser encoding was set to UTF-8 you still have incorrect characters on page, then do a database dump again. Open the dump and check what the dump specifies for encoding. I had a situation where even after all of this work the database dump said:

CREATE DATABASE 'dbname' DEFAULT CHARACTER SET latin1 COLLATE latin1_general_ci;

This may be caused due to the fact that you reused (emptied and imported into) a previous database. You will need to drop all the tables of the database again, go into Operations, and set encoding there go Unicode_general_ci.

Do the import again.

Check encoding.

After all of this is done, create a backup dump in several formats.

You may now attempt to do an upgrade on your CMS if you need to.

CMS MUST ALSO MAKE ALL CALLS FORMATTED IN UTF8

Also, for a database copy, a dump is not necessarily an accurate representation of database format. For example, here is an example of a dump (first result) compared to the source import file:

~ > file MKRD.sql

MKRD.sql: UTF-8 Unicode English text, with very long lines

~ > file db2012-12-10_MKRD.sql

db2012-12-10_MKRD.sql: UTF-8 Unicode English text

~ >

An article to follow if you have a very large database (>50MB): http://streetsmartingit.blogspot.com/2008/04/how-to-changeconvert-your-mysql.html

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