Error 1115 (42000): Unknown character set: 'utf8mb4'

Question

I have a MySQL dump and I'm trying to restore it using:

mysql -u"username" -p"password" --host="127.0.0.1" mysql_db < mysql_db

However, this throws the error:

ERROR 1115 (42000) at line 3231: Unknown character set: 'utf8mb4'

This is line 3231-3233:

/*!50003 SET character_set_client = utf8mb4 */ ;
/*!50003 SET character_set_results = utf8mb4 */ ;
/*!50003 SET collation_connection = utf8mb4_general_ci */ ;

I'm using MySQL 5.1.69. How can I resolve this error?

Answer 1

You can try:

Open the sql file through a text editor to find and replace all

utf8mb4 to utf8

Import again.

Answer 2

Your version does not support this character set, I believe 5.5.3 introduced it. You should upgrade mysql to the version used to export this file.

The error is obvious: you set a certain character set in the code, but your version of mysql does not support it and therefore does not know it.

Based on https://dev.mysql. com/doc/refman/5.5/en/charset-unicode-utf8mb4.html：

So maybe you could set it to utf8, close your eyes and hope, but it depends on your data and I wouldn't recommend it.