Can't store UTF-8 Content in MySQL Using Java PreparedStatement

Question

For some strange reason I can\'t seem to add UTF-8 data to my MySQL database. When I enter a non-latin character, it\'s stored as ?????. Everything else is stored fine. S

Answer 1

There is 2 points in the mysql server to check in order to correctly set the UTF-8 charset.

Database Level

This is obtained by creating it :

CREATE DATABASE 'db' CHARACTER SET 'utf8';

Table Level

All of the tables need to be in UTF-8 also (which seems to be the case for you)

CREATE TABLE  `Table1` (
    [...]
) DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8 COLLATE=utf8_general_ci;

The important part being DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8 COLLATE=utf8_general_ci

Finally, if your code weren't handling utf8 correctly, you could have forced your JVM to use utf8 encoding by changing the settings by on startup :

java -Dfile.encoding=UTF-8 [...]

or changing the environment variable

"**JAVA_TOOLS_OPTIONS**" to -Dfile.encoding="UTF-8"

or programmatically by using :

System.setProperty("file.encoding" , "UTF-8");

(this last one may not have the desire effect since the JVM caches value of default character encoding on startup)

Hope that helped.