Hi @mtoreihi,
One way to check whether the encoding has inadvertently changed (this can also happen during mysqldump/mysql transfer, on some versions I’ve needed to specify --default-character-set=utf8 when dumping the data) is by checking string lengths. On your old system (that’s working), try to identify a setting that’s causing you trouble and run something like…
SELECT LENGTH(setting_value) FROM journal_settings WHERE setting_type='object';
Try the same query on your new server and ensure that the lengths are the same. If they’re slightly different, it’s likely that the encodings of accented characters have inadvertently changed. (If you have a lot of data, you might need to add WHERE setting_name = 'xyz' to the query.)
Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team