How to remove bad characters that are not suitable for utf8 encoding in MySQL?

Question

I have dirty data. Sometimes it contains characters like this. I use this data to make queries like

WHERE a.address IN (\'mydatahere\')

For

Answer 1

You can encode and then decode it to/from UTF-8:

String label = "look into my eyes 〠.〠";

Charset charset = Charset.forName("UTF-8");
label = charset.decode(charset.encode(label)).toString();

System.out.println(label);

output:

look into my eyes ?.?

edit: I think this might only work on Java 6.