saving emoji to mysql using hibernate Incorrect string value: '\xF0\x9F\x98\x88\xF0\x9F...' for column 'name' at row 1

my connection string has the following properties
useUnicode=true&characterEncoding=utf8&character_set_server=utf8mb4&charset=utf8mb4

and I used

	jpaProperties.put("hibernate.connection.useUnicode", true);
	jpaProperties.put("hibernate.connection.characterEncoding", "utf8");
	jpaProperties.put("hibernate.connection.CharSet", "utf8mb4");

the DB also supports utf8mb4 since when I add a record manually it saves it correctly

still getting errors when trying to save an emoji

Incorrect string value: '\xF0\x9F\x98\x88\xF0\x9F...' for column 'name' at row 1

I'm quite confident that you clearly expressed your intention to use UTF-8 against your whole technology stack... except your data.

Your real issue here is that your data (the original string) is not valid UTF-8 to begin with. You can easily verify this with the following snippet:

public static boolean isValidUTF8(byte[] input) {
        CharsetDecoder utf8Decoder = Charset.forName("UTF-8").newDecoder();
        try {
            utf8Decoder.decode(ByteBuffer.wrap(input));
            return true;
        } catch (CharacterCodingException e) {
            return false;
        }
    }

You should instead use utf8mb4 all the way (including your column definition, which should be ... CHARSET=utf8mb4 COLLATE utf8mb4_general_ci or ... CHARACTER SET utf8mb4 COLLATE utf8mb4_bin).

You need to pay extra attention on MySQL Connector version (and configuration) according to the documentation.

I Solved it by upgrading the mysql-connector-java to 5.1.49 and adding the following to the connection string

{connection string}?characterEncoding=UTF-8&useUnicode=true

reference:https://dev.mysql.com/doc/connector-j/5.1/en/connector-j-reference-charsets.html