Question

I’m using Netbeans building a web application using Java, JSP that handle a database with Hebrew fields.

The DDL is as follows:

String cityTable = "CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS hebrew_test.table ("
                            +"id int(11) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,"
                            +"en varchar(30) NOT NULL,"
                            +"he varchar(30) COLLATE utf8_bin NOT NULL,"
                            +"PRIMARY KEY (id)"
                            +") ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8 COLLATE=utf8_bin AUTO_INCREMENT=1;";
String insert = "INSERT INTO hebrew_test.table (en, he) VALUES ('A','a')";
String insert2 = "INSERT INTO hebrew_test.table (en, he) VALUES ('B','ב')";
String insert3 = "INSERT INTO hebrew_test.table (en, he) VALUES ('C','אבג')";


executeSQLCommand(cityTable);
executeSQLCommand(insert);
executeSQLCommand(insert2);
executeSQLCommand(insert3);

The output tabel I get:

1   A   a
2   B   ?
3   C   ???

Instead of:

1   A   a
2   B   ב
3   C   אבג

I tried Hebrew appears as question marks in Netbeans, but that isn’t the same problem. I get the question marks in the table.

Also I defined the table to be in UTF8_bin as you can see in the above code.

Answer 1

You need to tell the JDBC driver to use UTF-8 encoding while decoding the characters representing the SQL query to bytes. You can do that by adding useUnicode=yes and characterEncoding=UTF-8 query parameters to the JDBC connection URL.

jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/db_name?useUnicode=yes&characterEncoding=UTF-8

It will otherwise use the operating system platform default charset. The MySQL JDBC driver is itself well aware about the encoding used in both the client side (where the JDBC code runs) and the server side (where the DB table is). Any character which is not covered by the charset used by the DB table will be replaced by a question mark.

See also:

• Spring Encoding with CharacterEncodingFilter in web.xml