How to transfer a Joomla site and not get  characters

When transfer a database I was getting weird characters on the the new website. The problem was happening on the import from Mysql . Here's how to import the Joomla mysql database without  characters. In the mysql file find all the instances of CHARSET=latin1 and replace with CHARSET=utf8 that should do it. You may also find the post How to transfer using SSH useful, if you have shell access.