DB backup corruption

[Justwade]

I was adding a user_tracker sql file and messed up royally.

So I went to phpMyadmin in Cpanel and dropped all the tables in my DB, then imported by browsing my PC for a backup I made before the above mess (which I can discuss in that thread later)

But now some of my products with the backup have an A with an upside down vowel sign above it in place of some of the spaces between words inconsistently throughout site text.

-such as thisAAA or just thisA (I don't know how to do the vowel sign).

What would corrupt the DB this way and is there something more serous I should be looking at? I suppose I can just go edit all occurrences but wondered it this is common. The corruption showed up after I backed up DB.

[MarW]

Hi!

Did you save the backup in a .txt file?
What do you see, if you open this file? If you see the unexpected characters there as well, then you could simply replace them with spaces and do the import again.

If the file is fine, then you may have charset problems, try saving the file using the same charset as your database tables, then do the import again.

[Justwade]

I was able to edit out all the road "A"pples, as I like to call em in my editable text. I haven't found any errors in the file. I assume it was a charset problem. I found other errors such as special characters in foreign names messed up. And some links on my link page with various color highlight changes. I just edited everything out.

Thanks for your advice, I have since looked into this "charset" and learned new ways to backup better in the future.