I've inherited a small webapp that is using MariaDB for persistence. Some of the forms have textarea fields for extended text to be entered. Someone reported an issue saving a form with some text that they had pasted from an email. The message started with this: ------------------ Caused by: org.mariadb.jdbc.internal.util.dao.QueryException: Incorrect string value: '\xC2\x95\x09Onb...' for column 'ssimpact' at row 1 ---------------- I found where "Onb" is in the text, and right before it is a "bullet" character. So, this appeared to be a Unicode conversion issue. I tried pasting the same text after it had been passed to me, and it didn't fail. I'm pretty sure it didn't fail because that process of "passing it around" filtered the text to be all valid characters. The person who reported the problem said that when she just resubmitted it, it didn't fail. That might also point to a "cleansing" process that resulted in the submitted characters being legal. What are some reasonable strategies for getting this to work a little better?