Our client contact from a Web Design Company we develop web applications and business websites for rang us late yesterday with a problem they had encountered. They were migrating a database from one MySQL database server to another and noticed that question marks and other strange characters such as aeons or blackbox question marks are appearing everywhere.

How did this happen?
This happens because the test server’s character set (utf8) did not match the production servers client (which is set to latin1 by default) this is what does all the importing and since UTF8 Unicode has some characters that are missing or are different to latin1, they are replaced with a question mark.

» Read more: MySQL Funny/Strange Characters replacing apostrophes after import