How to insert Unicode values to MySQL using Java

Hello friends.. Today i have came up with something new for me.. and i think this will be useful for me.Specially for our Sri Lankan  friends who are willing to develop Sinhale Unicode based java programs.Here i used basic two concepts.

• First one is Insert Unicode format values to MySQL database
• Retrieve data and display it using a combo box.

I know if you can insert and retrieve data you can handle anything based on it. So lets starts the works. In this post i will tel you how to create a database in MySQL and create tables and fields to store data in Unicode format.

Another important thing you must know.I normally use my own ways when i am programming. I mean the way i am developing programs may be unique to me.Please consider about this when you are getting something from here.

Create a database in MySQL

• I used phpMyAdmin to create my database and sometimes i used MySQL GUI tools for check my values.
• MySQL GUI tools support to view Unicode values from a database
• See my SQL backup file below and you can restore this backup file using phpMyAdmin.

--
-- Database: `unicode`
--
CREATE DATABASE `unicode` DEFAULT CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci;
USE `unicode`;

-- --------------------------------------------------------

-- --------------------------------------------------------

--
-- Table structure for table `unicode`
--

CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `unicode` (
  `id` int(11) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
  `name` varchar(100) NOT NULL,
  `job` varchar(50) NOT NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY (`id`)
) ENGINE=InnoDB  DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8 AUTO_INCREMENT=20 ;

Don’t worry at the end of the line you can download my database backup file. See i have created database in utf8_general_ci format and my table also in that format.

Now you have a database that you can store values in Unicode formats. If you cannot understand what i am saying see below screenshot. I got the

You can see some of values display as ??? and u0dc3 and my native language.

• Up to 6 id i inserted values from manually using MySQL GUI tools.
• In id 16 i inserted values from jTextBox and when i am insert it i got only ??? marks in my database.I tried several times using different methods but i couldn’t fix it.( Don’t worry i fixed it in this movement )

OK i am now going to give my Connection class. If you saw my previous posts i used my connection class in same way but now i added something extra to my connection class.

/*
 * To change this template, choose Tools | Templates
 * and open the template in the editor.
 */

package javaapplication1;

import java.sql.Connection;
import java.sql.DriverManager;
import javax.swing.JOptionPane;

/**
 *
 * @author Developer
 */
public class connection {

    public Connection creatConnection () throws ClassNotFoundException
    {
           Connection conn=null;

        try
         {
            Class.forName("com.mysql.jdbc.Driver").newInstance();//call jdbc driver
            String url = "jdbc:mysql://localhost/unicode?useUnicode=true&characterEncoding=UTF-8";//getting url
            conn = DriverManager.getConnection(url,"root","");//create connection
        }

        catch (Exception e)
        {
         // JOptionPane.showMessageDialog(null,"Error occured!.."+ e.getLocalizedMessage());
          JOptionPane.showMessageDialog(null, e.getMessage(), "Ooops",JOptionPane.ERROR_MESSAGE, null);//exeption hanling
        }

        return conn;//return connection to all
    }

}

OK. Now see clearly this code. I said i had some ??? values. The way i fixed it, i used this extra code to end of my string ( ?useUnicode=true&characterEncoding=UTF-8″; )

String url = “jdbc:mysql://localhost/unicode?useUnicode=true&characterEncoding=UTF-8”;

OK Now you created the connection class successfully. I will see you in next post How to insert data using java GUI.