Error "Incorrect string value" in logs when adding emojis to Web Content

Issue

• When inserting emojis (emoticons) to a Web Content article, the portal fails to add/update the article and an error similar to the one below is shown on logs.

09:33:30.544 ERROR [http-nio2-8080-exec-48][JDBCExceptionReporter:234] Incorrect string value: '\xF0\x9F\x98\x8D\xE2\x9D...' for column 'content' at row 1

Environment

• Liferay DXP 7.x

Resolution

• While Liferay DXP supports emoji, changes must be made to both the database and to the portal-ext.properties DB connection string. This article deals the procedure with MySQL only, but similar solutions are available to other RDBMS.
• Create the database with the character set utf8mb4 instead of utf8 (which is an alias for utf8mb3). Example:

CREATE DATABASE `lportal` DEFAULT CHARACTER SET utf8mb4 COLLATE utf8mb4_unicode_ci;

• Create the tables with the charset utf8mb4 instead of utf8 . Example:

CREATE TABLE `tablename` (
(...)
 PRIMARY KEY (`primaryKey`)
) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8mb4 COLLATE utf8mb4_unicode_ci;

• If the database already exists, dump it with mysqldump and replace the parameters DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8; to DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8mb4 COLLATE utf8mb4_unicode_ci; for each CREATE TABLE query.
• Change the property jdbc.default.url from portal-ext.properties replacing the parameter characterEncoding=UTF-8 to useUnicode=true.

Additional Information

• LPS-43195: Exception occurred when input "emoji" as content on mobile device