Recover original data saved as "???????" from mysql database [duplicate]
MySQL replaced those characters with question marks when they were inserted into the database. The original data is lost forever -- there is no way to recover it.
Check your php/apache/codeigniter logs for database inserts/updates - maybe you will find there the original data which was inserted.
This happened because of the database collation. In this particular case it is latin1_swedish_ci.
Actually, the collation is a set of characters that can be used across the fields of the tables in a database.If you try to use a character that is not in the character set of this collation, MySQL replaces it with a question mark, because it does not know what this character is.
Having said that, there is not way to retrieve your data back.The only way is to scan through some logs of the application or MySQL (if any).