I have not been utilizing local as much as I would like as I have issues where punctuation ends up odd characters when importing or exporting. I think at one time I started to research this and it came back to database variations but cant remember.
Here is an example. My phone number ends up looking like this.
1 ÔǬ(515) 599-1012ÔǼ
I am using duplicator to create my archives.
Any thoughts. I really should be developing locallly if possible.
Hi @rrmccabe
In the spirit of sharing, because I do not specifically know the answer for your unique situation; these links are very helpful to understand what can be tweaked to experiment.
Getting familuar with a birds-eye view of the datas journey will help.
wp-config.php; what values are set for DB_CHARSET and DB_COLLATE.wp-config.php; what values are set for DB_CHARSET and DB_COLLATE.Hint: Having these use the same values, is a good starting point before importing any data into the target system.
Understanding how passive or aggressive the generated sql data file is defined as, also helps.
Are the sql commands within the generated sql data file doing DROP TABLE is aggressive; while only containing CREATE TABLE would be considered passive.
When there are known issues in the target system (after import), try re-generating the sql data file to include the more aggressive DROP TABLE commands.
In turn, when imported into the traget system, this will leverage the wp-config.php → DB_CHARSET and DB_COLLATE to align the target systems table definition and its imported data with those same encodings from the source system.
Hint: Occassionally, with really stuborn data migrations, the helpful applications used in the source system have had to be abandonded and the native database manger used to directly generate the export sql data file, with the more aggressive DROP+CREATE options selected … knowing this is considered the nucular option when imported into any target system.
As always, all of this is experimental and might need to be done a few times as you explore and get familuar with your unique circumstance (a disclaimer) … so just remember to have fun with the puzzle knowing that your target system might get more than a few lobotomies along the way. 
Thank you for sharing this @johnlang86!
Thanks for the info. Will check in to this 
