“Incorrect string value” when trying to insert UTF-8 into MySQL via JDBC?

Question

This is how my connection is set:
Connection conn = DriverManager.getConnection(url + dbName + \"?useUnicode=true&characterEncoding=utf-8\", userName, password

Answer 1

If you are creating a new MySQL table, you can specify the charset of all columns upon creation, and that fixed the issue for me.

CREATE TABLE tablename (

)
CHARSET SET utf8mb4 COLLATE utf8mb4_unicode_ci;

You can read more details: https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/8.0/en/charset-column.html