Unicode (hexadecimal) character literals in MySQL

Question

Is there a way to specify Unicode character literals in MySQL?

I want to replace a Unicode character with an Ascii character, something like the following:

Answer 1

Thanks for your suggestions, but I think the problem was further back in the system.

There's a lot of levels to unpick, but as far as I can tell, (on this server at least) the command

set names utf8

makes the utf-8 handling work correctly, whereas

set character set utf8

doesn't.

In my environment, these are being called from PHP using PDO, for what difference that may make.

Thanks anyway!