Title: migrating site – database problem
Last modified: August 18, 2016

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# migrating site – database problem

 *  [scormeny](https://wordpress.org/support/users/scormeny/)
 * (@scormeny)
 * [19 years, 2 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/migrating-site-database-problem/)
 * I have a site that I created in WordPress 2.1.2. I’m moving it to a new host.
   I’m having what I think of as “the utf-8 problem,” where the “special characters”
   in my posts are all turned into question marks after I moved the database contents.
 * To move the database contents, I:
 * 1. used the WP-DB-Backup 2.0.1 to download the database in tar.gz format to my
   hard drive (Mac OS X Tiger).
 * 2. used phpMyAdmin on my new host, to upload the tar.gz’d database file to its
   new home.
 * There’s nothing else in this database, and I still have my original files, so
   I don’t mind doing this process again and changing some settings to make it work
   right.
 * The database on my new host uses the “UTF-8 Unicode” characterset, but it looks
   like I’ve got a choice. Should I set it to something else and then re-upload 
   the database contents?
 * Thanks for help!

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)

 *  Thread Starter [scormeny](https://wordpress.org/support/users/scormeny/)
 * (@scormeny)
 * [19 years, 2 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/migrating-site-database-problem/#post-545179)
 * Hi … not sure if the lack of response indicates that I asked my question poorly,
   but if anybody stumbles across this again, I’d be most appreciative!
 * This is a recurring problem for me as I often develop sites on my development
   server and then move them to my clients’ servers elsewhere. I’d love a good solution
   for moving my wordpress data from one mysql installation to another without needing
   to re-key all the special characters.
 * Thanks!
 *  [fulvio](https://wordpress.org/support/users/fulvio/)
 * (@fulvio)
 * [19 years, 2 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/migrating-site-database-problem/#post-545189)
 * I have almost exactly the same problem. I hope someone can help here.
 * You can see the symptom by going to my site: [http://www.shilsholecommunity.org](http://www.shilsholecommunity.org).
   Most posts older that April 1 show the “question marks” in place of special characters.
 * I got to this state by doing a backup (exporting) from an old MySQL DB (3.23.58),
   and importing into a more recent MySQL DB (5.0.24a). I then changed the wp-config.
   php setting to point to the new DB, but I didn’t change the wordpress code at
   all. I did this to prepare to upgrade from WP 2.0.2 to 2.1.2, since the upgrade
   requires MySQL v 4.0 or later.
 * Thanks!

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)

The topic ‘migrating site – database problem’ is closed to new replies.

## Tags

 * [characters](https://wordpress.org/support/topic-tag/characters/)
 * [database](https://wordpress.org/support/topic-tag/database/)
 * [encoding](https://wordpress.org/support/topic-tag/encoding/)
 * [MySQL](https://wordpress.org/support/topic-tag/mysql/)
 * [upload](https://wordpress.org/support/topic-tag/upload/)
 * [utf8](https://wordpress.org/support/topic-tag/utf8/)

 * In: [Installing WordPress](https://wordpress.org/support/forum/installation/)
 * 2 replies
 * 2 participants
 * Last reply from: [fulvio](https://wordpress.org/support/users/fulvio/)
 * Last activity: [19 years, 2 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/migrating-site-database-problem/#post-545189)
 * Status: not resolved

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