Why are iPhone Emojis Showing Up Blank in My MySQL Database?

iPhone Emojis Cause MySQL Inserted Values to Become Blank

When inserting emoticons from an iPhone app into MySQL tables, the resulting values often become blank. This issue arises when the emoticons exceed the character range supported by the specified field type.

Character Encoding Limitations

Most iOS emojis use code points beyond the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP) of the Unicode table. For example, the "Smiling Face with Open Mouth and Smiling Eyes" emoji is located at U 1F604.

Prior to version 5.5, MySQL only supported UTF-8 for the BMP (characters between U 0000 and U FFFF). Consequently, it cannot store characters like U 1F604.

Resolution

To resolve this issue, consider the following options:

• MySQL 5.5 : Upgrade to MySQL 5.5 or later and use character sets that support extended Unicode, such as utf8mb4, utf16, or utf32. Ensure that both the column character set and the connection encoding from PHP match.
• MySQL < 5.5: If using MySQL below version 5.5, employ a BLOB column type, which stores raw bytes without regard to characters. The drawback is that text search and indexing will be inefficient.

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