displaying Japanese characters retrieved from MySQL in R

Question

I am struggling to display Japanese characters in a dataframe, which have been retrieved from a MySQL database using the RMySQL package. Japanese characters display fine if

Answer 1

When trying to use utf8/utf8mb4, if you see Question Marks (regular ones, not black diamonds),

• The bytes to be stored are not encoded as utf8. Fix this.
• The column in the database is CHARACTER SET utf8 (or utf8mb4). Fix this.
• Also, check that the connection during reading is utf8.

Answer 2

The problem seems to be fixed by adding the following line before retrieving that data:

rs <- dbSendQuery(con, 'set character set "utf8"')