JDBC character encoding

24
votes

I have a Java Web application running on GlassFish 3 and JPA (EclipseLink) on MySQL. The problem I'm facing is that if I'm saving entities to the database with the update() method, String fields lose integrity; '?' is shown instead of some characters.

The server, pages and database are configured to use UTF-8.

After I post form data, the next page shows the data correctly. Furthermore it "seems" in NetBeans debug that the String property of the current entity stores the correct value too. I don't know if NetBeans debug can be trusted; might be that it decodes correctly, however it's incorrect.

4
javamysqljdbccharacter-encoding
What is the database and what connection string are you using? - Pascal Thivent
I'm using MySQL and the connection string is: jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/administer - Daniel Szalay
A link for those who are looking to use utf8mb4: dev.mysql.com/doc/connector-j/en/… - Daniel Szalay

4 Answers

52
votes

It's JDBC, not JPA that determines the encoding:

jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/administer?characterEncoding=utf8
12
votes

I solved it with the following: I used the GlassFish admin interface to add this property to my connection pool's settings:

characterEncoding = UTF-8

5
votes

New version JDBC driver auto detect the characterEncoding. You do not need to set it explicitly.

0
votes

I had to add useUnicode=true as well, so I had to concat the parameters with '&' so it looks like this:

jdbc:mysql://127.0.0.1:3306/warranteer?useUnicode=true&characterEncoding=UTF-8

If you're using maven profiles to set the MySQL URL, like me, make sure you put & instead & because maven unescape the url when writing the persistence.xml file to classes folder.