utf 8 - JPA utf-8 characters not persisted

Question

I have a simple web application where I use JPA.

I have an entity called BlogEntry.

When I submit a new BlogEntry, when I debug my application I see the utf8 characters just fine.

For example

em.persist(entity);

In this line, if I debug for example:

entity.getTitle()

I can successfuly see utf-8 characters in the IDE. ( like ??, or ?? )

Also, my database has UTF8 collation and I can insert utf-8 characters just fine with sql using like "INSERT INTO..."

However, with JPA, the characters are persisted as ????

Why might this be?

Regards.

Here is my persistence.xml:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<persistence xmlns="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/persistence" version="2.0">
    <persistence-unit name="Persistence">
        <provider>org.hibernate.ejb.HibernatePersistence</provider>
        <class>com.tugay.blog.core.model.Blogentry</class>
        <properties>
            <property name="javax.persistence.jdbc.driver" value="com.mysql.jdbc.Driver"/>
            <property name="javax.persistence.jdbc.url" value="jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/blogdatabase"/>
            <property name="javax.persistence.jdbc.user" value="root"/>
            <property name="javax.persistence.jdbc.password" value="aabbccdd"/>
        </properties>
    </persistence-unit>
</persistence>

Answer 1

use the character encoding in the property of persistence.xml file

<property name="javax.persistence.jdbc.url" 
   value="jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/blogdatabase?useUnicode=yes&amp;characterEncoding=UTF-8"/>