MySQL 8.0: Strange behavior with string comparison in WHERE clause using UTF-8 encoding
I'm stuck trying to Could someone explain I've been banging my head against this for hours. I've looked through the documentation and I'm still confused about I'm working on a project and hit a roadblock. I'm working with an scenario with MySQL 8.0 where string comparisons in a `WHERE` clause seem to yield unexpected results. I have a table `users` that contains a column `username` with UTF-8 encoded strings. Here’s a simplified version of my query: ```sql SELECT * FROM users WHERE username = 'José'; ``` However, when I run this query, it returns no results, even though I know there are records in the database with that exact username. I checked the character set of the `username` column, and it's set to `utf8mb4`, which should support the characters correctly. To troubleshoot, I tried: - Using `BINARY` in the comparison: `WHERE BINARY username = 'José'` but it still didn't return the expected record. - Checking for trailing spaces or different character encodings by running `SELECT username, HEX(username) FROM users;`. This returned `4A6F73E9` for the username, which looks correct. I also verified that the database and connection character set are set to `utf8mb4`: ```sql SHOW VARIABLES LIKE 'character_set%'; ``` This confirms both the database and connection are using `utf8mb4`. I am developing this application using PHP with the PDO extension. Is there a configuration or best practice that I might be missing? Could it be related to collation issues, or is there something else that could cause this string comparison to unexpected result? Any insights would be greatly appreciated! Any ideas what could be causing this? Am I missing something obvious? Is there a better approach? My team is using Sql for this CLI tool. Any ideas how to fix this? Thanks for your help in advance!