Incorrect string value: '\xF3\xAE\xA0\xA4e ...'

[Ignacio de Soto]

I'm getting this error message when inserting into a table with a charset of utf8 and collation of utf8_unicode_ci:

Incorrect string value: '\xF3\xAE\xA0\xA4e ...'

I've checked UTF-8 documentation and that string seems to be valid UTF-8 (F3 is the start of a 4 byte sequence and the following 3 characters are valid continuation characters). Also, doing an iconv("UTF-8", "UTF-8//IGNORE", $text) in PHP doesn't remove that sequence, while it still removes other invalid sequences, and checked other php functions that check for valid UTF-8 and none gave me problems with that sequence.

My mysql --version:

mysql Ver 14.14 Distrib 5.1.38, for Win64 (unknown)

Why am I getting this error and how can I prevent it? I can manually remove that sequence before saving the text but how do I know what other sequences do I have to remove?

Thanks.