Question

Is it possible that simply using mysql -h [IP] -u root -p [DATABASE] < [FILE].sql to restore a database would cause Spanish characters to lose their “Spanish” and show up all funky?

Answer 1

From this:

The issue is essentially tied up with a mismatch between default
collation in MySQL and the collation / character sets specified in the
.sql file. To fix the issue, make sure they all match. If you’re using
MySQL 4+, the default collation is probably UTF-8, so just make sure
that the file has a default colltion set too. Putting the following
line at the top of the .sql seems to do the trick:

/*!40101 SET NAMES utf8 */;

The reason seems to be with the importer: even though there is a
default collation set on the database and on the tables, if there’s no
default for the whole file each insert gets misinterpreted as a UTF-8
table that must be encapsulated in as latin1. Also check that the
table creation statements in the .sql file are UTF-8 too, like this:

CREATE TABLE `wp_comments` (
...
) ENGINE=MyISAM  DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8;