Java MySQL UTF-8 Encoding Issue

You mentioned a frequent issue encountered when working with Java and MySQL, where special characters are being stored as question marks ("?"). This problem arises when the MySQL database, tables, and columns are set to use UTF-8 character encoding, but the JDBC connection is not properly configured.

In your code, when establishing a connection to the database, you can specify additional parameters to ensure correct character encoding. By adding useUnicode=true&characterEncoding=utf-8 to the JDBC connection URL, you explicitly instruct the connection to use UTF-8 encoding. This ensures that data with special characters is handled correctly.

To resolve your problem, modify the code you provided as follows:

con = DriverManager.getConnection("jdbc:mysql:///dbname?useUnicode=true&characterEncoding=utf-8", "user", "pass");

This modification will ensure that the JDBC connection is configured with the appropriate encoding parameters, allowing special characters to be stored and retrieved correctly.