mysqldump --set-chartset flag

The mysqldump command has a --set-charset flag that can be used to specify the character set for the SQL script.

The character set is the encoding used to represent characters in the SQL script. It is important to specify the correct character set to ensure that the script is interpreted correctly and that special characters are displayed correctly.

To use the --set-charset flag, you can include it in the mysqldump command and specify the character set you want to use. For example:

mysqldump my_app --set-charset=utf8mb4 > my_backup.sql

This will create a my_backup.sql SQL file using the UTF-8 character set.

When to use the --set-chartset flag?

The --set-charset flag is particularly useful if the database you are backing up uses a character set other than the default character set of the MySQL server.