XF 2.0 Moved Hosts - No Emoji?

[mobilephone2003]

Bit of an odd one this one.

I've moved hosts but emojis on threads are coming up as question marks.

The tables have already been converted so I can't convert them again.

Is there anything I can do?

 

[Chris D]

Make sure:

$config['fullUnicode'] = true;

Is still set in your src/config.php file.

If it is, then unfortunately it was likely caused by some sort of issue during the database back up and restore process.

 

[mobilephone2003]

It is unfortunately.

Will reattempt a database transfer, does anything need to be set on the database itself?

 

[Chris D]

Not really certain what would have gone wrong other than it somehow being saved as utf8 rather than utf8mb4 when exporting.

This might not actually affect the table collation or database charset itself, but the file it produced may not have produced valid utf8mb4.

 

[Chris D]

If mysqldump was used then it might need the --default-character-set=utf8mb4 flag setting.

 

[mobilephone2003]

By the looks of it a cpanel export to cpanel import does this.

Tried full site/DB only and both do it.

Phpmyadmin export to PHPmyadmin import is falling over due to the size. Will see if host can sort.

 

[Chris D]

mysqldump is definitely a more robust tool for the job, but it does need shell access. The aforementioned character set flag with mysqldump is probably what will sort it.

 

[mobilephone2003]

Gave up in the end, we've just started using XF 2.0 so i replaced the originals that were showing up as question marks.

Noted in case we move again, thanks.

 

[MattW]

@Chris D - in this case, do you know if it's possible to import again only specific columns following a migration?

A site I've just moved to a new server appears to be missing all the newer emojis and they are now question marks in posts / signatures. I've done another DB dump with the --default-character-set=utf8mb4 set, but the site has been open for almost 12 hours post move, so wanted to try and only re-import the columns where this is now broken.

Apologies if this is out of scope of the support on here.

 

[Chris D]

We once had this problem which is what spawned this:

Public service announcement: Check your MySQL backup!

Having moved servers today, we learned that our MySQL backups were subtly corrupted by an insidious issue that can be difficult to spot until it's too late. All emoji and high-ascii characters in our database dumps were invalid. This is due to a behaviour in mysqldump, which defaults the...

xenforo.com

We did actually write a PHP script to fix this which I can provide but there's a chance it may be outdated and will almost certainly need some environment specific changes (such as database names).

I didn't write it myself so there would certainly be little to no support (or warranty!) provided but happy to send it across if you think it might help.

 

[MattW]

Thanks Chris, just been looking at that now.

If you could, that would be great, and I can take a look at see what could be done.