Restore MySQL DB with Unicode characters (Arabic and Kurdish) in .gz format

Question

I have a MySQL backup file in .gz format that was created by the backup wizard in cPanel. When the restoration is done by the backup wizard, contents with Arab

Answer 1

I added the lines

character-set-server=utf8
collation-server=utf8_general_ci

to the mysqld section of /etc/mysql/my.cnf on my new server, then exported the data using

mysqldump oldDB --default-character-set=latin1 -r dbCopy.sql

and imported it into the new DB using

mysql> SOURCE dbCopy.sql. Worked like a charm...

Answer 2

This is a fairly common problem caused by inconsistent encoding schemes when creating and exporting the database. Here is the simplest way to solve it:

1. Import your backup file
2. Export it again, but using latin1 encoding
3. Manually edit the exported file, change all occurrences of latin1 to utf8.
4. Import the edited file.