Character Issues and MySQL

A lot of times I work with databases with French characters or other characters and I finally found a solution that has helped in my particular case thus it may help in yours. It is to specify the the character encoding right on the command line with

--default-character-set=utf8

so, a command might look like

 $ mysql -u Tory -pMyPassword --default-character-set=utf8 < commandsToRun.sql