ERROR 1115 (42000): Unknown character set: 'utf8mb4'

Question

I have a MySQL dump, which I tried to restore with:

mysql -u\"username\" -p\"password\" --host=\"127.0.0.1\" mysql_db < mysql_db

However

Answer 1

I am answering the question - as I didn't find any of them complete. As nowadays Unknown character set: 'utf8mb4' is quite prevalent as lot of deployments have MySQL less then 5.5.3 (version in which utf8mb4 was added).

---

The error clearly states that you don't have utf8mb4 supported on your stage db server.

Cause: probably locally you have MySQL version 5.5.3 or greater, and on stage/hosted VPS you have MySQL server version less then 5.5.3

The utf8mb4 character sets was added in MySQL 5.5.3.

utf8mb4 was added because of a bug in MySQL's utf8 character set. MySQL's handling of the utf8 character set only allows a maximum of 3 bytes for a single codepoint, which isn't enough to represent the entirety of Unicode (Maximum codepoint = 0x10FFFF). Because they didn't want to potentially break any stuff that relied on this buggy behaviour, utf8mb4 was added. Documentation here.

From SO answer:

---

Verification: To verify you can check the current character set and collation for the DB you're importing the dump from - How do I see what character set a MySQL database / table / column is?

---

Solution 1: Simply upgrade your MySQL server to 5.5.3 (at-least) - for next time be conscious about the version you use locally, for stage, and for prod, all must have to be same. A suggestion - in present the default character set should be utf8mb4.

Solution 2 (not recommended): Convert the current character set to utf8, and then export the data - it'll load ok.

Answer 2

maybe whole database + tables + fields should have the same charset??!

i.e.

CREATE TABLE `politicas` (
  `ID` int(11) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
  `Nombre` varchar(250) CHARACTER SET utf8 NOT NULL,
  -------------------------------------^here!!!!!!!!!!!
  PRIMARY KEY (`ID`)
) ENGINE=MyISAM AUTO_INCREMENT=3 DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8;
  -------------------------------------------------^here!!!!!!!!!