Aqua Data Studio UTF-8 Support ('é' shows as 'é')

Question

Situation

I have a lot of UTF-8 characters saved in a MySQL database.

In PHP, I do this:

SELECT name FROM institutions;

The characters display correctly with no problems and no additional processing necessary within the query or within the PHP script.

In Aqua Data Studio 16.0.9 I'm having a bit of a problem displaying UTF-8 characters. Instead of Å it displays as Ã…, instead of é it displays as é and so on.

What I've tried so far are in terms of the query itself:

1. SELECT CONVERT(name USING utf8) FROM institutions;
2. SET NAMES 'utf8'; SELECT name FROM institutions;
3. A combination of the solutions above.
4. Changed the font of Aqua Data Studio to a font that supports UTF-8 like Verdana, Arial, etc.

So far none of what I did worked.

Questions

• How do I support UTF-8 in Aqua Data Studio 16.0.9?
• Can I instead of doing the fix in the query itself, just configure Aqua Data Studio so that any other queries in the future are UTF-8 compatible?

Edit

I also tried adding ?characterEncoding=UTF-8 to the Driver Parameters under the Server Properties window and still I can't get it to display the characters correctly.

Answer 1

Make sure to have these 3 lines in your my.conf :

collation-server = utf8_unicode_ci
init-connect='SET NAMES utf8'
character-set-server = utf8

In ADS v16 Server Properties, you can override the default connection to force utf8 by setting:
?characterEncoding=utf8

Answer 2

Mojibake. Usually...

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