Hello, I hope this is the proper mailing list to ask such questions, I apologise if it isn't. I am having some problems with unusual Unicode characters in my MariaDB database. $ mariadb --version mariadb Ver 15.1 Distrib 10.3.17-MariaDB, for debian-linux-gnu (x86_64) using readline 5.2 $ sudo ./mariadb.php [sudo] Passwort für bjoern: Query: INSERT INTO `test` SET `string` = '🙋 Huhu. wie geht es dir?' Inserted: '🙋 Huhu. wie geht es dir?' Returned: '???? Huhu. wie geht es dir?' SHOW VARIABLES LIKE 'character%': character_set_client utf8 character_set_connection utf8 character_set_database utf8 character_set_filesystem binary character_set_results utf8 character_set_server latin1 character_set_system utf8 character_sets_dir /usr/share/mysql/charsets/ As you can see here, MariaDB does not take the character '🙋' ( https://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/1f64b/index.htm ) and instead replaces it with four question marks and I have no idea why. I've attached the PHP code for the example. I would be most grateful for any suggestion. Regards, Björn Keil