How to set useUnicode=true and characterEncoding=utf8 properties on Spring-managed MySQL JDBC connection

Question

I\'m currently building a Spring MVC webapp and the database is the vital backend part. For whatever reason, however, Spring is refusing to process the data as UTF-8. Since the

Answer 1

The problem may be caused by specifying utf8 and not UTF-8. From Using Character Sets and Unicode:

When specifying character encodings on the client side, use Java-style names. The following table lists MySQL character set names and the corresponding Java-style names...

and utf8 maps to UTF-8. Try the following JDBC URL:

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