phpMyAdmin displaying varchar fields as individual hex values in table view

Question

I'm running phpMyAdmin in MAMP-pro, and recently noticed some weird behavior that started after I upgraded to phpMyAdmin 4.1.7. Basically, varchar fields do not show up correctly when viewing a table, or even query results, but not in an individual record display.

The product field is a varchar field, and is typically something like "300x250" and not that string of hex-values:

Editing the first record gives me this screen which displays the value properly:

This problem started when I upgraded to 4.1.7 locally, and so I downgraded back to 4.0.6 and everything was normal again. However, these tables are copied over from another production database. I export from production using phpMyAdmin, then drop my local tables, and re-import them into my local.

All varchar fields display as strings of two-digit hex values now, but only in those tables that I have dropped and imported. Tables that haven't been touched in a while still display the correct varchar values.

I never saw this problem before the upgrade, but now it's started happening on 4.0.6. The production server is using 3.4.10.1, but it hasn't been updated recently, so I don't think that's the issue as I used to do this process regularly and never had any issues.

Edit: So after further reading, I realized that the issue was that the varchar fields were set to utf8_bin and needed to be changed to utf8_general_ci. What I don't understand is that the fields in the production database are set to utf8_bin, and they display correctly at all times, and why this wasn't an issue until recently.

Answer 1

Edit ./config.inc.php and change line

$cfg['Servers'][$i]['extension'] = 'mysql';

to

$cfg['Servers'][$i]['extension'] = 'mysqli';