Re: Arabic characters converted to "???????????"

[Rick James]

Question marks come from this:

- The client has a valid character, and
- The `SET NAMES` agrees with the encoding that the client has, but
- The target column's `CHARACTER SET` does not include the intended character.

Examples:

- `latin1` handles only Western European characters; trying to put an Eastern European character or any Asian character in
it won't fit.
- `latin2` and `cp1250` can handle Czech, so conversions between them are mostly OK, but not between either of them and `latin1`
- `utf8mb4` is a superset of `utf8`. Putting a utf8 character into utf8mb4 is ok, but the reverse will result in a '?' in some cases.

The characters that were converted to '?' can not be recovered from the table.

How to fix future `INSERTs`?

- Using utf8 on the table column(s) probably works in all cases.
- Otherwise, pick some `CHARACTER SET` for the table column(s) that reasonably matches the client data.