MySQL allows you set to set the character-set and collation to utf-8. To my understanding this will allow you to store UTF-8 data in your database. This makes it really nice when you have users copying and pasting data into your CMS. It will store the special double-quotes, trademark symbols, and pretty much anything else you can throw at it. No big deal to backup up, right? Well I did an export within PHPMyAdmin and using the mysqldump utility. Neither one worked, and I was pissed. And actually so was the client because I didn’t catch it before we launched the site. So last night I was frantically searching Google as fast as I could (notice I wasn’t searching the web, I was searching Google – that should make an interesting blog post for another time). And I eventually found my answer. It had to do with the mediums inbetween the export and import to support utf-8 characters – Great.

So without having to use a 3rd party app, or write some code, I was able to figure out how to do it with myqldump. Instead of using the greater than symbol to redirect the output into a file, mysqldump has a switch -r to use to redirect output into a file. They say to use it on Windows machines, so I kind of felt dirty for using in the linux command line :/ But I did, and guess what, an import using virtualmin on the production server and everything worked, the data came across cleanly.

From the brief reading that I did, using the power of output redirection at the unix command line can break UTF-8 encoding. I guess it kind of makes sense if the server or terminal you are using doesn’t support it. But it isn’t something I would really think about.

Just for those wondering what I ended up doing. I normally do a mysqldump like

mysqldump -u user_name -p database_name > mydump.sql

This time around, i just had to change it to

mysqldump -u user_name -p database_name -r mydump.sql

So simple I could throw up.