UTF-8 stored as question marks in MySQL DB

Question

I have a MySQL database which was created as utf8mb4 (with collation utf8mb4_collate_ci) which I'm accessing via some JSP pages. The JSP pages are all stored as UTF-8, and all include the following tags:

<%@ page contentType="text/html; charset=utf-8" %>

<meta http-equiv="Content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">

Using MySQL Workbench, I can store non-ASCII text in the DB and display it, and in the JSP pages, I can display the stored text correctly. However, when I try to insert new rows containing non-ASCII text from a JSP page they end up being stored as "??????" in the database (and displayed as such whether selected from JSP or from MySQL Workbench). If I display the text I'm inserting as part of the JSP page, it displays correctly in my browser.

The only thing I can think of is that the JSP-to-MySQL network connection somehow uses the wrong encoding, but I'm totally baffled how or why.

Any advice welcomed!

Possible duplicate of [UTF-8 all the way through](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/279170/utf-8-all-the-way-through) — Madhur Bhaiya, Aug 31 '18 at 07:34
Not quite, but your link led me to other pages that solved the problem. Thanks! — user1636349, Aug 31 '18 at 08:43
See "question mark" in https://stackoverflow.com/questions/38363566/trouble-with-utf8-characters-what-i-see-is-not-what-i-stored — Rick James, Sep 13 '18 at 02:45

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Aug 31 '18 at 08:42

It was indeed the JSP-to-MySQL encoding that was the problem. Using "show variables" revealed that "character_set_server" was the guilty party, being set to "latin1" instead of "utf8". Madhur Bhaiya's comment helped me to find some links to other pages which advised adding "?characterEncoding=utf8" to the connection string to override the server's default connection encoding. This solved the problem. Thanks, Madhur!

UTF-8 stored as question marks in MySQL DB

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