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17.3.4.4. Using Character Sets and Unicode

All strings sent from the JDBC driver to the server are converted automatically from native Java Unicode form to the client character encoding, including all queries sent via Statement.execute(), Statement.executeUpdate(), Statement.executeQuery() as well as all PreparedStatement and CallableStatement parameters with the exclusion of parameters set using setBytes(), setBinaryStream(), setAsciiStream(), setUnicodeStream() and setBlob().

Prior to MySQL Server 4.1, Connector/J supported a single character encoding per connection, which could either be automatically detected from the server configuration, or could be configured by the user through the useUnicode and characterEncoding properties.

Starting with MySQL Server 4.1, Connector/J supports a single character encoding between client and server, and any number of character encodings for data returned by the server to the client in ResultSets.

The character encoding between client and server is automatically detected upon connection. The encoding used by the driver is specified on the server via the character_set system variable for server versions older than 4.1.0 and character_set_server for server versions 4.1.0 and newer. For more information, see Section 9.1.3.1, “Server Character Set and Collation”.

To override the automatically detected encoding on the client side, use the characterEncoding property in the URL used to connect to the server.

When specifying character encodings on the client side, Java-style names should be used. The following table lists Java-style names for MySQL character sets:

MySQL to Java Encoding Name Translations. 

MySQL Character Set Name Java-Style Character Encoding Name
ascii US-ASCII
big5 Big5
gbk GBK
sjis SJIS (or Cp932 or MS932 for MySQL Server < 4.1.11)
cp932 Cp932 or MS932 (MySQL Server > 4.1.11)
gb2312 EUC_CN
ujis EUC_JP
euckr EUC_KR
latin1 Cp1252
latin2 ISO8859_2
greek ISO8859_7
hebrew ISO8859_8
cp866 Cp866
tis620 TIS620
cp1250 Cp1250
cp1251 Cp1251
cp1257 Cp1257
macroman MacRoman
macce MacCentralEurope
utf8 UTF-8
ucs2 UnicodeBig

Warning

Do not issue the query 'set names' with Connector/J, as the driver will not detect that the character set has changed, and will continue to use the character set detected during the initial connection setup.

To allow multiple character sets to be sent from the client, the UTF-8 encoding should be used, either by configuring utf8 as the default server character set, or by configuring the JDBC driver to use UTF-8 through the characterEncoding property.


User Comments

Posted by Ben Iggulden on September 8 2006 6:34am[Delete] [Edit]

I had been having trouble getting JDBC connections to use the useUnicode and characterEncoding parameters using a JDBC URL like this:

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

My problem turned out to be that I was using MySQL Connector/J version 3.1.11. When I migrated to 3.1.13 the approach described here worked.

Posted by Mohammed Saleem on December 30 2009 6:23am[Delete] [Edit]

I had troubles with the UTF-8, too. sending UTF-8 characters into the database is fine, but when retrieving them, the JDBC driver doesn't encode them properly into the String Object, so I did a workaround and it worked with me:

String message = new String( rs.getBytes("message"), "UTF-8");

the message column is actually a varchar, anyway, it is working fine with me, but I am still not sure of it is the right way to do it

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