For MySQL, utf8 is not enough, you want utf8mb4

Someone entered 😨, the “fearful face emoticon”, in a forum on a website I run. But it didn’t display.

Here’s what I had to do to get it to work:

• ALTER DATABASE dbname CHARACTER SET utf8mb4 COLLATE utf8mb4_unicode_ci
• ALTER TABLE tablename CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET utf8mb4 COLLATE utf8mb4_unicode_ci
• ALTER TABLE tablename MODIFY columnname COLUMNNAMEEXISTINGTYPE CHARACTER SET utf8mb4;
• In my.conf:
  

  [client]
  default-character-set = utf8mb4

  [mysqld]
  collation-server = utf8mb4_unicode_ci
  init-connect=’SET NAMES utf8mb4′
  character-set-server = utf8mb4

Note that if you are converting from latin-1 not utf-8 you will need to convert columns to blob and then to utf8mb4 to correctly preserved already latin1-encoded special characters.