Question

I’m using the mysql dbms to store pages from Wikipedia. I’ve set the character-set encoding to utf-8 (wikipedia encoding) in my.cnf file with the directive:

[mysqld]
character_set_server = utf8

And created my database with the 'chararacter set utf8' property definition.

I’ve also changed the charset-encoding for mysqld client by:

• inserting the 'charSet=utf8' property when initializing my jdbc driver.
• doing a query to 'set names utf8'

However I’ve noticed that mysql server replaces some characters with others.

For example it replaces á with a.

UPDATE

I’ve run the command show variables like '%char%' ensuring that both character_set_client and character_set_set are utf8.

How can I store the correct chars in my db? Thanks!

Answer 1

Try to specify the encoding in the DB URL :

url="jdbc:mysql://localhost:port/DBNAME?characterEncoding=UTF-8"

Here’s some more information regarding my answer :

The following is taken from the MySQL documentation (http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/connector-j-reference-charsets.html) :

All strings sent from the JDBC driver to the server are converted
automatically from native Java Unicode form to the client character
encoding, including all queries sent using Statement.execute(),
Statement.executeUpdate(), Statement.executeQuery() as well as all
PreparedStatement and CallableStatement parameters with the exclusion
of parameters set using setBytes(), setBinaryStream(),
setAsciiStream(), setUnicodeStream() and setBlob().

Setting the Character Encoding
The character encoding between client
and server is automatically detected upon connection. You specify the
encoding on the server using the character_set_server for server
versions 4.1.0 and newer. The driver automatically uses the encoding
specified by the server. To override the automatically detected
encoding on the client side, use the characterEncoding property in the
URL used to connect to the server. To allow multiple character sets
to be sent from the client, use the UTF-8 encoding, either by
configuring utf8 as the default server character set, or by
configuring the JDBC driver to use UTF-8 through the characterEncoding
property.

I encountered a similar problem a few months ago. I checked the default value of character_set_server on my MySQL (using the “mysqld –verbose –help” command).
It was latin1.