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. So for example, "this is an example®™" is stored fine, but "和英辞典" is stored as "????".

The connection url is fine:

private DataSource getDB() throws PropertyVetoException {
    ComboPooledDataSource db = new ComboPooledDataSource();
    db.setDriverClass("com.mysql.jdbc.Driver");
    db.setJdbcUrl("jdbc:mysql://domain.com:3306/db?useUnicode=true&characterEncoding=UTF-8");
    db.setUser("...");
    db.setPassword("...");
    return db;
}

I'm using PreparedStatement as you would expect, I even tried entering "set names utf8" as someone suggested.

    Connection conn = null;
    PreparedStatement stmt = null;
    ResultSet rs = null;
    try {
        conn = db.getConnection();

        stmt = conn.prepareStatement("set names utf8");
        stmt.execute();
        stmt = conn.prepareStatement("set character set utf8");
        stmt.execute();

                    ... set title...
        stmt = conn.prepareStatement("INSERT INTO Table (title) VALUES (?)");
        stmt.setString(1,title);

        stmt.execute();
    } catch (final SQLException e) {
    ...

The table itself seems to be fine.

Default Character Set: utf8
Default Collation: utf8_general_ci
...
Field title:
Type text
Character Set: utf8
Collation: utf8_unicode_ci

I tested it by entering in Unicode ("和英辞典" specifically) through a GUI editor and then selecting from the table -- and it was returned just fine. So this seems to be an issue with JDBC.

What am I missing?

Answer 1

On your JDBC connection string, you just need set the charset encoding like this:

jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/dbname?characterEncoding=utf8