Problems retrieving utf8 encoded fields from mysql database

[Mark O' Sullivan]

Hi,
I currently have some fields in tables in the mysql database defined with the "collation utf8 default" for internationalisation. I currently retrieve my data from the database using prepared statements ie resultsets ,for example

rs.getString("message")

rs being ResultSet but when I retrieve the utf8 fields, they return ??? instead of the utf-8 field I require. Any idea where is the best place to set this encoding, is it within the resultset itself when I'm retrieving and how do I go about this? The fields in the database tables are set correctly. Thanks in advance.

[Paul Clapham]

How do you know they return question marks?

[Rob Spoor]

If you're printing these values to System.out, you must know that the Windows Command Prompt and quite a lot of Unix shells have problems with characters that aren't basic / extended Latin (in other words, with a char value of <= 255).