Re: How to display character set and collation method using PHP

[Rick James]

In 4.0 and before, characters were simply bytes. MySQL had no concept of CHARACTER SET.

It did not even know the term "SESSION":
"The GLOBAL and SESSION modifiers are new in MySQL 4.0.3."
-- http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/4.1/en/show-variables.html

You can do SHOW VARIABLES to see what was available. In 5.5, there are a lot more VARIABLES.

If you know what encoding the old bytes are in, _and_ if they are in a consistent encoding (that is, no mixing of utf8 and latin1 in the same column), then it is possible to 'do the right thing' after migrating the data.

http://mysql.rjweb.org/doc.php/charcoll
will give you some clues and understanding of what the issues are. Unfortunately, there is no "do this" statement specific for your case.