Mangled characters after a move.
THE SYMPTOM
Accented characters, curly quotes and symbols appearing as question marks or unfamiliar sequences.
Common after a migration between servers with different defaults.
WHY IT HAPPENS
The data was stored in one character set and read as another.
Older sites frequently use latin1 or an older utf8; modern installations use utf8mb4.
PREVENTING IT
Export and import specifying the same character set.
Check the source database's collation in phpMyAdmin before exporting, and create the destination to match.
FIXING IT AFTERWARDS
Difficult once the data is mangled. The reliable route is to re-import the original dump with correct settings rather than attempting to repair the text.
Keep the original dump until you have confirmed the import is correct.
WHAT TO CHECK
Look at content containing accented characters or currency symbols immediately after any import.
If they display correctly, the encoding is right.
THE UTF8MB4 POINT
Older utf8 in MySQL does not cover all characters, including emoji. utf8mb4 does.
Modern applications expect utf8mb4.
