How to properly set utf8 encoding with jdbc and My

Question

JDBC and MySQL work just fine in my project except when it comes down to accented characters. This is the URL I use to access the database:

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

Suppose a resultSet = preparedStatement.executeQuery(), and then a System.out.println(resultSet.getString("text_with_accents"));. What's stored in the database is àèìòù (note that I've already set the right encoding in the database and all its tables), but what I get is ?????.

Is there a way to fix this?

Answer 1

Probably...

• you had utf8-encoded data (good)
• SET NAMES latin1 was in effect (default, but wrong)
• the column was declared CHARACTER SET latin1 (default, but wrong)

Answer 2

Try to change your url like

url="jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/dbname?useUnicode=true&characterEncoding=utf8" 

The & must be represented as &