hi, I wrote a software and it worked quite good, but after I installed it on a new machine with j2se 1.4 I've problems with the german special characters. this code works good on the old machine (jdk 1.3.1) and prints the wanted characters like �,�,�. -------------------- Class.forName("org.gjt.mm.mysql.Driver").newInstance(); java.sql.Connection conn; conn = DriverManager.getConnection("jdbc:mysql://localhost/testdb?user=testuser&password=xxxx"); Statement s = conn.createStatement(); ResultSet r = s.executeQuery("select something from testtb where id='1'"); r.first(); System.out.println( r.getString(1) ); -------------------- but on the new machine (j2se 1.4) I only receive the character ?. I updated my org.gjt.mm.mysql to the current MySQL Connector/J 3.0.9 and added conn = DriverManager.getConnection("jdbc:mysql://localhost/testdb?user=testuser&password=xxxx&useUnicode=true&characterEncoding=ISO-8859-1"); but I've got still the same problem. Thanks in advance Markus