Re: Chinese data not appraing

[Rick James]

Suggest using utf8mb4 instead of utf8. However, that won't solve what you are seeing.

You are seeing "Mojibake" -- where non-English characters turn into multiple gibberish characters.

- The bytes you have in the client are correctly encoded in utf8 or utf8mb4 (good).
- You connected with `SET NAMES latin1` (or `set_charset('latin1')` or ...), probably by default. (It should have been `utf8mb4`.)
- The column in the tables may or may not have been `CHARACTER SET utf8mb4`, but it should have been that.

If you need to **fix the data** it takes a "2-step ALTER", something like

ALTER TABLE Tbl MODIFY COLUMN col VARBINARY(...) ...;
ALTER TABLE Tbl MODIFY COLUMN col VARCHAR(...) ... CHARACTER SET utf8 ...;

utf8mb4 is needed for Chinese and Emoji; utf8 suffices for most other languages.