I had an experience where I had to roll back my database after failed upgrade. After importing the backup database, I encountered the weird characters like “‚Äô” which suppose to be an apostrophe. I later realized that the export’s collation was set to “latin1_swedish_ci” when I skimmed through the exported SQL file. I had to use the EE’s Search and Replace for every weird characters.
This puzzled me that I had to look at my other client’s database and try exporting the same way I did with the previous client. I then saw the same thing. I compared the exported SQL file and the live database (remember it has not been rolled back). I found that the exported SQL has weird characters while the database doesn’t. (see attached image - example A and B)
I looked into the tables’ setting and saw that all tables are set to “utf8_general_ci” except at the very bottom, you’ll find “latin1_swedish_ci”. (see another attached image)
I also found that when I go to ‘Operations’ tab, the collation is set to “latin1_swedish_ci”.
Do I have the setting wrong?