chinese character insertion mysql

I am having problems inserting chinese characters in MySQL. I am able to insert the chinese characters only in Query Browser / Workbench, but it comes out as '??' when using my开发者_StackOverflow program. I somehow managed to get it to work on my computer (Windows 7) , but when I tested it on another (Windows 7 too) , it came out as question marks. It also won't work on a Windows XP Chinese. Any help?

The driver is transferring in UTF-8 seeing your comment on the connection string. The database table fields are probably specified UTF-8 too (check this).

So you have a normal Unicode string in Java. Check that by a dump of String.getBytes("UTF-8"). No question mark should appear.

In a web application you need to set the encoding before using the Writer. Otherwise you get such questing marks. Other possibilities to err are String.getBytes() (default OS encoding), Writer on a FileOutputStream using a StreamOutputStream also without encoding.

1.use cmd to connect database for example:

D:\MySQL\bin>mysql -u root -D test -p

2.to change the database to UTF-8 for example:

mysql>alter database [database name] default character set utf8