⚠️ Problem?
When using mysqldump tool from your command line (such as my Ubuntu 18.04 server) I found the default settings were not exporting the emoji characters correctly. Wrong charset. It was leaving ??? instead of the actual emoji entity.
💡 How to fix it?
Define the utf8mb4 charset when exporting your database:
--default-character-set=utf8mb4
Code language: JavaScript (javascript)
Export
mysqldump --default-character-set=utf8mb4 -u your_user -p database_name > file.sql
Code language: JavaScript (javascript)
Import
mysql -u your_user -p database_name < file.sql
Code language: CSS (css)