We often use WP Migrate DB to migrate our WordPress databases from development to production. While importing a database the other day, I noticed a number of character encoding issues after using the following command:
mysql -u user -p database < site-migrate-20131008184109.sql
After poking around online, I realized that I needed to include the default character set while importing the data:
mysql -u user -p --default-character-set=utf8 database < site-migrate-20131008184109.sql
A small but good thing to remember from now on.