Any solution to the 4-byte utf8 characters problem?

[Florin H]

Hello,

I've just stumbled over a "Incorrect string value: ‘\xF0\x90\x80\x80\xF0\x90…’ for column ‘xxx’" error. After reading about it and looking at the data that is being written I found out that I'm trying to insert into the above column a text that contains 4-byte utf-8 characters. And I've also read that MySQL doesn't handle these kind of characters.

This is what I found on the bugs.mysql.com site: "The driver sets the sql_mode
to 'strict_trans_tables', which means you'll get a truncation error when you try and use unicode characters that are represented with more than 3 bytes in utf-8."

My question is: is there a way around this problem? I don't want to search every string for bad characters in my application code, can't I do it at DB level? Isn't there a setting or a parameter in MySQL that can parse/remove the bad characters so that I can add the string to the DB?

Thank you...