In MySQL, if you want to make sure that your Unicode fields are mangled, never use ‘utf8’, use ‘utf8mb3’. Since ‘utf8’ is an alias to ‘utf8mb3’, that alias migh

In MySQL, if you want to make sure that your Unicode fields are mangled, never use ‘utf8’, use ‘utf8mb3’. Since ‘utf8’ is an alias to ‘utf8mb3’, that alias might eventually be updated to point to ‘utf8mb4’ which won’t mangle your characters. The only safe choice here is to explicitly use ‘utf8mb3’.