Migrating site - encoding type issue?

I am in the process of migrating a site from an old host (Server config unknown) to mine, and I have run into a little issue.

Some of the resources in the manager were not showing in the editor section, odd I thought, so I checked the DB tables and the content is still there.

I then copied the content from the DB, into the editor and saved, the only difference I saw was that all spaces in paragraphs where changed to :


I presume this is some sort of encoding issue. Error logs show nothing, Chrome dev tools show no errors in HTTP Post and GETs.

Any suggestions on what I can ammend to change this and make all the resources show once more in the editor? Otherwise I will be on a massive copy/paste operation (over 200 resources!)

Thanks in advance!

Check the existing site's database settings for charset and collation, then manually create your copy's database and set the same charset and collation.

Be sure to look at the character set of the individual tables and text fields in the DB -- it might not match that of the DB itself.

If you decide to convert everything to UTF-8, this might help: http://bobsguides.com/convert-db-utf8.html