Upgrading to UTF-8

[Roger Wilson, modificado 10 Anos atrás.]

So there's been a request to use Chinese characters on our current liferay site. When attempting to save the translation, we started seeing errors like the following:

14:28:44,990 ERROR [org.hibernate.util.JDBCExceptionReporter] (http--0.0.0.0-8080-2) Incorrect string value: '\xE5\xA4\xA7\xE5\xA4\xA7...' for column 'content' at row 1

Going back and forth on this a while, I'm beginning to think that this database was not set up to use UTF-8 encoding. Which would lead me to 2 questions:

1. How can I confirm if the DB uses UTF-8 encoding?

and

2. Assuming it does not use UTF-8, how can I update/alter the existing tables so that UTF-8 is used?

I've seen a few mechanisms by how UTF-8 is set up, but this is taking an existing DB with a large amount of data and updating it so that it uses the necessary encoding. Also note that the way this was set up, I have no easy access that I'm aware of to speak with the DB directly: because of security reasons I can't use phpMyAdmin. I've tried installing the mysql server package to see if I could end up writing a SQL UPDATE query that would change the encoding for all the tables, but it doesn't look like it's picking up the existing liferay database for me to use.

[Brian Scott Schupbach, modificado 10 Anos atrás.]

I think you can put in the parameter &characterEncoding=utf8 into your jdbc URL

[Roger Wilson, modificado 10 Anos atrás.]

You're referring to something like the following? I've been toying with placing this into my portal-ext.properties:

jdbc.default.driverClassName=com.mysql.jdbc.Driver
jdbc.default.url=jdbc:mysql://localhost/lportal?useUnicode=true&characterEncoding=UTF-8&useFastDateParsing=false
jdbc.default.username=
jdbc.default.password=

This has been giving me errors so far because it's having issues connecting to the DB -- which is a separate issue, but I didn't want to spend more time on it if it wasn't going to fix the primary problem. Would this resolve UTF-8 character issues in already-existing DBs? I was thinking this might only work if the DB is created from scratch, and that I was going to have to find a way to access the DB directly and run an UPDATE SQL query on its tables (not easy when phpMyAdmin is off-limits).

I actually have Chinese characters working on a local environment, but that uses the Tomcat app server, and this situation is using JBoss 7.x, so this is probably growing out of that discrepancy.