Using utf8mb4 with php and mysql

Question

I have read that mysql >= 5.5.3 fully supports every possible character if you USE the encoding utf8mb4 for a certain table/column http://mathiasbynens.be/n

Answer 1

• utf-32: This is a character encoding using a fixed 4-bytes per characters
• utf-8: This is a character encoding using up to 4 bytes per characters, but the most frequent characters are coded on only 1, 2 or 3 characters.

MySQL's utf-8 doesn't support characters coded on more than 3 characters, so they added utf-8mb4, which is really utf-8.