What are the best practices for handling character encoding and collation when importing large MySQL backups in PHP?
When importing large MySQL backups in PHP, it is important to ensure that the character encoding and collation settings are properly handled to avoid data corruption or display issues. One way to address this is by setting the appropriate character set and collation for the database connection before executing the import query.
// Set the character set and collation for the database connection
$mysqli = new mysqli("localhost", "username", "password", "database");
$mysqli->set_charset("utf8mb4");
$mysqli->query("SET collation_connection = utf8mb4_unicode_ci");
// Import the MySQL backup file
$backupFile = 'path/to/backup.sql';
$backupContents = file_get_contents($backupFile);
$mysqli->multi_query($backupContents);
// Close the database connection
$mysqli->close();