MySQL’s “utf8” isn’t UTF-8
But here’s the rub: MySQL’s “utf8” isn’t UTF-8.
The “utf8” encoding only supports three bytes per character. The real UTF-8 encoding — which everybody uses, including you — needs up to four bytes per character.
MySQL developers never fixed this bug. They released a workaround in 2010: a new character set called “utf8mb4”.
