store polish characters mysql

Question

I am trying to save characters like "ą", "ć", "ł" but they are saved in the database as question marks (I save them using phpMyAdmin).

The database and table's collation is utf8_bin.

Answer 1

Try changing the collation to:

utf8_unicode_ci 

or

utf8_polish_ci 

You can refer to: http://mysql.rjweb.org/doc.php/charcoll

Also you can TRY altering the specific column with:

ALTER TABLE tbl MODIFY COLUMN txt TEXT CHARACTER SET utf8

Answer 2

I've searched a lot and finally, I got a solution with this:

ALTER TABLE tableName MODIFY COLUMN columnName VARCHAR(64) CHARACTER SET `binary`;

You can change VARCHAR(64) to match your needs. I hope this helps someone. Note that I did not only required to store Polish characters but French and Spanish ones as well. So the solutions above might work for just polish chars.