I just moved a site over from an old domain to a new domain (this means the server-side folder changes too).

I replaced all instances of the old domain in the database with the new domain and couldn’t find any instances of the directory name. I checked that nowhere in the database the old domain or directory name are mentioned (at least not in plain text).

Various stuff inexplicably broke, one of them being all menus: They vanished (the theme has logic to hide the menus if they are empty, so maybe that was triggered). Deleting and recreating them worked, but I’d like to automate that.

Can someone explain to me how the menus depend on the domain in a way that doesn’t show up in the database in plain-text? Is the url encoded somehow so my regular expressions don’t find it?