We have an application running Laravel 5.6 on MySQL 5.6. We can't upgrade those yet. We're hoping to fix an issue with accepting "special characters" in a form, but without upgrading MySQL yet.
I've changed the collation and and character set of select relevant columns, and also tried updating the whole table thusly though other columns are still mysql's "utf8" (aka utf8mb3)... but the special characters are not persisting. We're getting mojibake ("garbled text that is the result of text being decoded using an unintended character encoding")—for example, when we should have Ḇ٤ḞԍНǏƘԸⲘ০ΡɌȚЦѠƳȤѧᖯćễႹļṃʼnоᵲꜱừŵź, we instead get ????Ḇ????????٤ḞԍНǏ????ƘԸⲘ????০Ρ????Ɍ????ȚЦ????Ѡ.
The "special characters" (Ḇ٤Ḟ…) are being passed—intact—from the front-end to the backend, and then along in the backend—intact—as the stack sets the information as the value of a Doctrine Entity property—still intact. Then doctrine persists the info… and things get complicated as we move deeper into the lower levels of the ORM. I've yet to debug it that deep, but may have to because so far the database saves the mojibake, not the intact "special" characters.
I've also added character set and collation optional values to property declarations on the relevant Doctrine entity.
Laravel's database configuration has charset and collation settings too, but while I do need utf8mb4 for these few fields, the rest are still using utf8mb3, so I'm unsure about how setting the laravel config values might affect things.
I've tried various permutations of the settings, but not all yet. But, away for a couple of days I wanted to post this question in the hope of perhaps somebody else having some helpful advice or links to information. I've found helpful information about converting your application or database to utf8mb4, but nothing about a "partial conversion" like I'm trying here.
So, my question is this: Has anybody here come across this before? Trying to set just some fields to use utf8mb4 but without upgrading everything?
I don't have an easy-to-replicate example of the failure, but produce one in several days if need be.
Otherwise, thanks for reading.