How do I alter column to support unicode

Question

I have created a simple database table called players :

CREATE TABLE player (
    id              int(10)
                    NOT NULL
                    AUTO_INCREMENT
                    PRIMARY KEY,

    name            varchar(256)
                    NOT NULL
);

ALTER TABLE  players
    CHANGE name name
        varchar(256)
        CHARACTER SET utf8mb4
        COLLATE utf8mb4_unicode_ci;

I want to insert this entry into the database '𝔸𝕝𝕠𝕟𝕖' so I type

INSERT INTO player (name) VALUES ("𝔸𝕝𝕠𝕟𝕖")

However, when inserted, the name value becomes '???????????' .

How can I fix this and keep my database table as efficient as possible.?

Most of the names are normal ASCII characters but sometimes I have these fancy unicode characters.

Answer 1

As discussed over the comments : you have correctly altered your table so the name column accepts utf8 characters.

In this MySQL 5.7 DB Fiddle , string '𝔸𝕝𝕠𝕟𝕖' is properly inserted and displayed.

It is very likely that the issue that you are having commes from your client, which is not properly passing data to the MySQL server.

Since you are using PHP with the mysqli extension, you can set the default client character set for the connection by using the mysqli::set_charset function :

$conn->set_charset("utf8mb4");