UTF-8 character encoding

[catalinfeier]

I can't seem to be able to get data encoded in UTF-8 (cyrilic , arabic alphabets etc) from my MySQL database. Everything else works correctly and as expected.
Without HikariCP (no connection pooling) I used "useUnicode=true&characterEncoding=UTF-8" as a property for my connection and it worked.
With HikariCP i tried something similar for the configuration:
config.addDataSourceProperty("url", "jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/db?useUnicode=true&characterEncoding=UTF-8");
I also tried using the following:
config.addDataSourceProperty("characterEncoding",Charsets.UTF_8.name());
config.addDataSourceProperty("useUnicode","true");
Neither worked, the cyrilic characters were shown as ???.
My MySQL version is 5.5.27, but like i said without using connection pooling the character were shown correctly.
Any suggestions/ideas?

[brettwooldridge]

Oh, I thought my answer was wrong after I posted it so I deleted it. I'll attach it here again in case another user has the same issue. Set the encoding like this:

config.addDataSourceProperty("characterEncoding","utf8");
config.addDataSourceProperty("useUnicode","true");

[dimkir]

Maybe someone finds useful to specify the encoding in hikari.properties file like this:

acquireIncrement=3
acquireRetryDelay=1000
connectionTestQuery=SELECT 1
dataSourceClassName=com.mysql.jdbc.jdbc2.optional.MysqlDataSource
dataSource.user=yourUser
dataSource.password=yourPassword
dataSource.databaseName=your_database
dataSource.serverName=localhost
dataSource.encoding=UTF-8
           ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

This seems to work for me well.

[AyubOpen]

@brettwooldridge sorry for messaging on a closed thread, I am trying the same appoarch as you mentioned about config.add for utf-8, but I still see the issue of garbled characters. Code works if I use plain jdbc; below is my property file

//hikari.properties
driverClassName=oracle.jdbc.driver.OracleDriver
jdbcUrl=jdbc:oracle:thin:@localhost:1521/xe
maximumPoolSize=20
username=testdbapp
password=oracle
dataSource.cachePrepStmts=true
dataSource.prepStmtCacheSize=250

@configuration
public class AppConfig {

@Bean(destroyMethod = "close")
public DataSource dataSource() throws SQLException {
    HikariConfig config = new HikariConfig("/hikari.properties");
    config.addDataSourceProperty("characterEncoding","utf8"); //tried with UTF-8 as well
    config.addDataSourceProperty("useUnicode","true");
    HikariDataSource dataSource = new HikariDataSource(config);

    return dataSource;
}

}

this is a spring boot application, please advise