MySql Dump Issue with Chinese Characters

[Ian Grum]

I have a database that I am migrating from Mysql V4 to Mysql V5. There are 100 tables, the majority of which have migrated correctly. However, a number of tables store data that has a mixture of English and Chinese characters.

e.g. google is简体中文 in Chinese.

I used mysqldump to extract all information and save to a dump.sql file via phpmyadmin. When the dump.sql file was inspected the extract was not correct for the Chinese data. When this was loaded into the target database it looked like it was corrupted.

The mysql dump was initiated via phpmyadmin. After some investigation using phpmyadmin we found that if you used export->sql for a table and did NOT save the output to file but displayed it on the page the output was correct and you could cut and paste the SQL to the new database and use SQL to import the data. This imported the data correctly and the Chinese data was displayed correctly in the application. It is only when you use mysqldump to a file that the issue occurs.

I have tried to google this and search forums but with no luck.

Is anyone familiar with this issue.