UTF8, MySQL 4.1, and CFMX 7.0
I spent a good portion of my day trying to get unicode to work with MySQL 4.1 and CFMX 7.0. As it turns out, it’s actually pretty easy. I had the database tables created correctly. That I learned from earlier versions of MySQL. Just add this to the end of your CREATE TABLE command:
CHARACTER SET utf8;
I even had the connection string right in the data source form in the CFMX administrator:
useUnicode=true&characterEncoding=UTF8
The problem is that the connection string apparently doesn’t go in the “connection string” field. Since I’m using a newer MySQL driver than the one that shipped with CFMX 7 (that supports MySQL 4.x), I discovered that you actually have to append the connection string to the JDBC URL, like this:
jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/dataBaseName?useUnicode=true&characterEncoding=UTF8
Once I made the change, instant Japanese! I hope this saves someone out there several hours of head scratching.