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

Note that if you are using Spring Boot, you can do this using properties within application.properties instead of having to add extra parameters to your connection strings:

Put this into application.properties:

spring.datasource.connectionProperties=useUnicode=true;characterEncoding=utf-8;