I'm transferring all the data from a PHP + MySQL website my predecessor made, into a Flask application that I made. The MySQL database contains Chinese characters that show up as weird characters when I browse the data in PhpMyAdmin. However, they show up correctly as Chinese characters when it's retrieved from the database and rendered on the website.
So I downloaded the entire PHP project from the server, and exported the entire database in the SQL format, then ran them locally using xampp so I can experiment without making any destructive changes to the real website. Unfortunately, my locally-hosted version of the PHP website shows all Chinese characters as weird symbols like "æŽå³å£", even though I didn't change a single line of code.
My best guess is that something went wrong when I exported the database from the PhpMyAdmin server, causing the characters to be wrongly encoded. I made sure that both databases were using matching collations, which in this case is latin1_swedish_ci
.
Sorry I'm new to MySQL and PhpMyAdmin, does anyone know what might have gone wrong?