Force the ant task to use the <strong>UTF-8</strong> charset. It's a parameter to give to the mysqldump binary supported since <a href="http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/4.1/en/mysqldump.html#option_mysqldump_default-character-set" title="see reference">MySql version 4 (and maybe earlier).</a> something like: <code>mysqldump --default-character-set=utf8</code>