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It's been years and I still get mad every time I think about the fact that 'utf8' is a broken encoding and they had to make a new one called utf8mb4.

I have to trust my database. If I can't trust the authors of the database, then how do I trust the database?

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To save a Google for anyone like me - there’s nothing wrong with utf8. The problem was that MySQL had a broken implementation of utf8 (“utf8mb3”) which only supported Unicode characters which fit in 3 bytes. As a result you couldn’t save any data in your database which contained emoji.

This is upsetting because until recently if you asked for a utf8 column, this is what you got instead. You got something which was almost, but not quite compatible with utf8.

Interestingly, this was a mistake even the creators of UTF-8 wanted to make

> The 4, 5, and 6 byte sequences are only there for political reasons. I would prefer to delete these

Obviously 5 and 6 byte sequences are consigned to history but 4 byte sequences turned out to be useful for more than "political reasons".

http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/utf-8_history

(scroll right to the bottom)

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