Description:
We are running into a serious issue in our java application when migrating data from the mysql database into our oracle database when displaying bullets or registered trademarks or other special symbols. All of these symbols show up as question marks in our java application that is looking up this data in our oracle database. It turns out that the source mysql database has the encoding set to Latin1 and when we are connecting I add the &useUnicode=true&characterEncoding=UTF-8 in our jdbc connection parameter. However the special characters still show up as question marks when viewed from our java application. Our java application is retrieving this data from our oracle database as UTF8. Please let me know if this is a known issue or if there are additional parameters in mysql that we need to change, I even tried to set the characterEncoding to latin1 so that we match the source database encoding but that didnt make any difference.
How to repeat:
1) set the encoding of the mysql db to latin1
2) Log into mysql versiion 4.0.17 and create a sample table with one column thats a varchar
3) insert a string containing bullets/registered trademark symbols or other special characters
4) write a small java program to retrieve and display this information in a gui using jdbc with &useUnicode=true&characterEncoding=UTF-8 added to the jdbc connection url
5) verify what the characters look like in the display
Suggested fix:
All characters need to come across correctly as bullets or registered trademark signs etc
