Incorrect string value: '\xF0\x9F\x8E\xB6\xF0\x9F...' MySQL

I was finally able to figure out the issue.I had to change some settings in mysql configuration my.ini This article helped a lothttp://mathiasbynens.be/notes/mysql-utf8mb4#character-sets

First i changed the character set in my.ini to utf8mb4Next i ran the following commands in mysql client

SET NAMES utf8mb4; ALTER DATABASE dreams_twitter CHARACTER SET = utf8mb4 COLLATE = utf8mb4_general_ci;

Use the following command to check that the changes are made

SHOW VARIABLES WHERE Variable_name LIKE 'character\_set\_%' OR Variable_name LIKE 'collation%';

I had hit the same problem and learnt the following-

Even though database has a default character set of utf-8, it's possible for database columns to have a different character set in MySQL. Modified dB and the problematic column to UTF-8:

mysql> ALTER DATABASE MyDB CHARACTER SET 'utf8' COLLATE 'utf8_unicode_ci'mysql> ALTER TABLE database.table MODIFY COLUMN column_name VARCHAR(255) CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci NOT NULL;

Now creating new tables with:

> CREATE TABLE My_Table_Name (    twitter_id_str VARCHAR(255) NOT NULL UNIQUE,    twitter_screen_name VARCHAR(512) CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci,    .....  ) CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci;

It may be obvious, but it still was surprising to me, that SET NAMES utf8 is not compatible with utf8mb4 encoding. So for some apps changing table/column encoding was not enough. I had to change encoding in app configuration.

Redmine (ruby, ROR)

In config/database.yml:

production:  adapter: mysql2  database: redmine  host: localhost  username: redmine  password: passowrd  encoding: utf8mb4

Custom Yii application (PHP)

In config/db.php:

return [    'class' => yii\db\Connection::class,    'dsn' => 'mysql:host=localhost;dbname=yii',    'username' => 'yii',    'password' => 'password',    'charset' => 'utf8mb4',],

If you have utf8mb4 as a column/table encoding and still getting errors like this, make sure that you have configured correct charset for DB connection in your application.