MySQL UTF8 Windows export - Linux import

Question

I have MySQL database version 5.1.36, that came with WAMP installation. I used it for development purposes on Windows XP SP3, and it has some data in it, which is cyrillic, and the collation for all of those tables/columns is set to utf8_general_ci.

Now the time has come to move this database to pseudo-production environment, which is on Debian Lenny. Version of MySQL here is 5.0.51a.

I tried the following:

1. I exported the databse with data from phpmyadmin on Windows and saved the .sql file to be in UTF8.
2. Then, I transferred it through WinSCP (both with default and binary transfer settings) to Linux machine.
3. I created the database through command line: mysqladmin -u root -p create nbs

4. Finally, I tried to create tables and fill the data:

   mysql -u root -p --default-character-set=utf8 nbs < NBS_utf8_1.sql

However, this is where I'm getting the error, like:

ERROR 1064 (42000) at line 1: You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near ' CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `history_members` ( `id` int(11) NOT NULL AUTO_' at line 1

Something is messed up with encoding, I suppose... but don't know how and where. I think I read in the similar question on SO that binary mode for text transfer will only change the line breaks CRLF to LF (don't know if this is correct...). What am I missing here?

Thanks.

Answer 1

Here is what I found using PhpMyAdmin for a rough SQL import using remote shell :

 /*!40101 SET @OLD_CHARACTER_SET_CLIENT=@@CHARACTER_SET_CLIENT */;
 /*!40101 SET @OLD_CHARACTER_SET_RESULTS=@@CHARACTER_SET_RESULTS */;
 /*!40101 SET @OLD_COLLATION_CONNECTION=@@COLLATION_CONNECTION */;
 /*!40101 SET NAMES utf8mb4 */;

Answer 2

For this particular case, the problem was solved with the following modifications:

1) I set initial collation while creating the target database to utf8_general_ci,
2) I transferred the file with text mode through WinSCP,
3) I added SET NAMES 'utf8' COLLATE 'utf8_general_ci'; to the top of sql dump.