Emoji like `🎥` will be changed to `?` after `wp db import`

[miya0001]

Some of emoji text will be garbed after wp db import and wp db export.

Following is an example to represent this issue.
master...emoji-issue

The first test to check 🎥 will be passed but second one that is ran after wp db import will be failed.

Thanks. :)

Related: wp-cli/wp-cli#3949

[miya0001]

Ah, I found a solution to solve this problem as follows.

wp db export --default-character-set=utf8mb4

But I think this option should be passed as default.
Because it is difficult to realize emojis are broken for users.

What do you think?

[schlessera]

@miya0001 I'm open to adding this as a default setting, but I'm unsure what the exact ramifications are. Could this have any adverse effects that make it worse for some users? Could this break in some circumstances, for example where this character set might just not be available?

[sirtawast]

@miya0001 I'm open to adding this as a default setting, but I'm unsure what the exact ramifications are. Could this have any adverse effects that make it worse for some users? Could this break in some circumstances, for example where this character set might just not be available?

What is the current default then?

[miya0001]

@sirtawast

The default value of --default-character-set is utf8.
https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5/en/mysqldump.html#option_mysqldump_default-character-set

[miya0001]

I couldn't found the solution to detect character set utf8 or utf8mb4.

[wojsmol]

@miya0001 See this make/core blog post.

[morganhvidt]

I just lost all my emojis when migrating a site 🤪I'll try changing the --default-character-set next time. It would be nice if it's possible to have it as default.

[schlessera]

Yes, indeed, we should prioritize this to avoid situations like that. I'll work on getting this into the next release.

[dpacmittal]

Just got burned by this bug. We migrated the site to another server and noticed the emojis missing after a couple of hours. So we'll have to re-export (using mysqldump) and import the database and lose a few hours of user-generated content.

[schlessera]

Sorry to hear that, @dpacmittal . I got stuck on refactoring the DB command to make it easier to add defaults across the board (#160).

I'll try to get back to this as soon as possible to fix.

[mmirus]

Could be wrong, but is this already solved by specifying the correct DB_CHARSET in your WP config?

[jcatello]

This is still a problem and occurring more recently.

we can use wp cli export and wp cli import and have broken emojis.

we can then run mysqldump and mysql to import and the emojis remain in tact.

DB_CHARSET is set properly in both the source and target wp-config.php