Update database encoding error

What character encoding are you using? Changing the character encoding of a database is a nightmare. I’d suggest making sure you’re using UTF-8. If you’re not, and your site is in english – you may want to collate the database to UTF-8. IF you do this though, it will not affect any content already in the database. I hope this helps!

This post helped me out a bunch:
https://joemaller.com/1328/fixing-mixed-encoding-mysql-dumpfiles-with-wordpress/

I’m glad you found the answers you were looking for. I hope all is well.