How to save special characters in database

Question

I'm using a MySQL database and inserting like this:

  try (Connection connection = DbConnector.connectToDb();
             PreparedStatement stm = connection.prepareStatement("INSERT INTO Country (name) VALUES (?)")) {
            stm.setString(1, name);
            if (stm.executeUpdate() > 0) {
                result = true;
            }
        } catch (Exception e) {
            logStackTrace(e);
        }

Now when I insert: België it is saved in a weird way in the database the ë isn't saved. How can I solve this?

EDIT:

I just changed the table via:

ALTER DATABASE databasename CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci;
ALTER TABLE tablename CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci;

But still when I add a new one it isn't displayed correctly on the webpage.

Answer 1

There is 2 points in the database to check in order to correctly set the UTF-8 charset.

Database Level

This is obtained by creating it :

CREATE DATABASE 'db' CHARACTER SET 'utf8';

Table Level

All of the tables need to be in UTF-8 also (which seems to be the case for you)

CREATE TABLE  `Table1` (
    [...]
) DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8 COLLATE=utf8_general_ci;

The important part being DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8 COLLATE=utf8_general_ci

Finally, if your code weren't handling utf8 correctly, you could have forced your JVM to use utf8 encoding by changing the settings by on startup :

java -Dfile.encoding=UTF-8 [...]

or changing the environment variable

"**JAVA_TOOLS_OPTIONS**" to -Dfile.encoding="UTF-8"

or programmatically by using :

System.setProperty("file.encoding" , "UTF-8");

(this last one may not have the desire effect since the JVM caches value of default character encoding on startup)

Hope that helped.