Greek JDBC characters

Question

I'm having trouble inserting a record into a database containing Greek characters. Even if the default character set for the database is utf8, I also added parameters to the connection url that I get ????? instead of the actual Greek characters.

public class Queries 
{
    private static final String URL = "jdbc:mysql://localhost/Ezazel";
    private static final String USERNAME = "root";
    private static final String PASSWORD = "root";

    private Connection connection = null;
    private PreparedStatement insertSight = null;
    private PreparedStatement insertHotel = null;
public Queries()
    {
        try 
        {
            connection = DriverManager.getConnection( URL,USERNAME, PASSWORD );         
            insertSight = connection.prepareStatement( "INSERT INTO Sights ( Title, Description, Address, Latitude, Longitude ) VALUES ( ?, ?, ?, ?, ? )" );
            insertHotel = connection.prepareStatement( "INSERT INTO Hotels ( Title, Description, Address, Latitude, Longitude ) VALUES ( ?, ?, ?, ?, ? )" );
        } 
        catch ( SQLException e ) 
        {
            // TODO Auto-generated catch block
            e.printStackTrace();
            System.exit( 1 );
        }
    }

    public void addSight( String title, String description, String address, double latitude, double longitude )
    {
        try 
        {
            insertSight.setString( 1, title );
            insertSight.setString( 2, description );
            insertSight.setString( 3, address );
            insertSight.setDouble( 4, latitude );
            insertSight.setDouble( 5, longitude );

            insertSight.executeUpdate();        
        } 
        catch ( SQLException e )
        {
            e.printStackTrace();
        }
        finally
        {
            try 
            {
                insertSight.close();
                connection.close();
            } 
            catch ( SQLException e )
            {
                // TODO Auto-generated catch block
                e.printStackTrace();
                System.exit( 1 );
            }   
        }
    }
}

Answer 1

Try specifying utf-8 in your connection string,

private static final String URL = "jdbc:mysql://localhost/Ezazel?characterEncoding=utf8";

Also, where do you see ????? characters? Viewer should support UTF-8 if you had this in mind.

If the data is successfully saved in Greek, but only phpMyAdmin's visibility problem, try to check if UTF-8 is set for sorting and encoding

How to display UTF-8 characters in phpMyAdmin?