You normally need to instruct mysqldump not to bother messing about

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with the character set during export; see http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Backing_up_a_wiki#Character_set.

The problem is I don't have the possibility to use mysqldump (with that appropriate "--deafault-character-set" Option) from the command line. My provider does not provide it.

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You may also be able to run the dump file through iconv or similar if it's been corrupted.

Tried iconv, but it also failed. After conversation I get an "Specified key was too long; max key length is 1000 bytes" error during importing.

Is it really such a hard problem to backup the Wikipedia data? Cause the problem I have, must also involve a normal backup. No way to simply export and import the database back via phpmyadmin on MySQL 5 databases. All foreign special chars get corrupt. I wonder, why only so few people seem to have that problem.

Kai