New database character issues

This normally happens when the character encoding (‘colation’ in MySQL terms) is set differently on the two databases. When you are storing and retriving data from the same system it’s not a problem because what goes in is what comes out, but if the tables colation changes then it can treat the data differently depending on what’s set.

What I’d suggest doing is looking at what is set for the colation in your tables on the old DB and the new DB, and make sure that the new DB matches the old one.