JDBC url for MySQL configuration to use utf8 character encoding

Question

MySQL 5.6 Configuration

I have configured /etc/mysql/my.cnf manually to use utf8. See below:

[mysqld]
character-set-server=utf8
character-sets-dir=/usr/share/mysql/charsets

[mysql]
character-sets-dir=/usr/share/mysql/charsets default-character-set=utf8

[mysqladmin]
character-sets-dir=/usr/share/mysql/charsets default-character-set=utf8

[mysqlcheck]
character-sets-dir=/usr/share/mysql/charsets default-character-set=utf8

[mysqldump]
character-sets-dir=/usr/share/mysql/charsets default-character-set=utf8

[mysqlimport]
character-sets-dir=/usr/share/mysql/charsets default-character-set=utf8

[mysqlshow]
character-sets-dir=/usr/share/mysql/charsets default-character-set=utf8

[client]
character-sets-dir=/usr/share/mysql/charsets default-character-set=utf8

From console:

mysql> show variables like 'char%';
+--------------------------+----------------------------+
| Variable_name            | Value                      |
+--------------------------+----------------------------+
| character_set_client     | utf8                       |
| character_set_connection | utf8                       |
| character_set_database   | utf8                       |
| character_set_filesystem | binary                     |
| character_set_results    | utf8                       |
| character_set_server     | utf8                       |
| character_set_system     | utf8                       |
| character_sets_dir       | /usr/share/mysql/charsets/ |
+--------------------------+----------------------------+
8 rows in set (0.01 sec)

Application configuration

Now for the web-app I used both of this connection url in Tomcat's context.xml

url="jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/test?autoReconnect=true&useUnicode=true&characterEncoding=UTF-8"

url="jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/test?autoReconnect=true&useUnicode=true&characterEncoding=UTF-8&characterSetResults=utf8&connectionCollation=utf8_general_ci"

Above does not work and gives me following for the application.

show variables like 'char%';
+--------------------------+----------------------------+
| Variable_name            | Value                      |
+--------------------------+----------------------------+
| character_set_client     | utf8mb4                    |
| character_set_connection | utf8                       |
| character_set_database   | utf8                       |
| character_set_filesystem | binary                     |
| character_set_results    | utf8mb4                    |
| character_set_server     | utf8                       |
| character_set_system     | utf8                       |
| character_sets_dir       | /usr/share/mysql/charsets/ |
+--------------------------+----------------------------+

---

What might be wrong here? Why it is showing utf8mb4 instead utf8?

Answer 1

You may have to do with the following:

Changes in MySQL Connector/J 5.1.13 (2010-06-24)

• Connector/J did not support utf8mb4 for servers 5.5.2 and newer.

  Connector/J now auto-detects servers configured with character_set_server=utf8mb4 or treats the Java encoding utf-8 passed using characterEncoding=... as utf8mb4 in the SET NAMES= calls it makes when establishing the connection. (Bug #54175)