*SOLVED* Collation diacritical (accent) characters not displaying properly

We are using latin1_spanish_ci collation for latin1 character set with utf-8 encoding in our MariaDB.

In DbVisualizer, with MariaDB jdbc connector, all of the Spanish characters with diacritical (accent) marks were displaying like this �, �, �, �, �, �, �, �, �, �

Evidently, the MariaDB jdbc connector does not fully support specifying collation at this time.

I switched to the mySQL jdbc connector and set the driver property connectionCollation = latin1_spanish_ci. Same problem.

It was not until I also set the driver property characterEncoding = utf-8 that the Spanish characters with diacritical (accent) marks displayed correctly like this ü, é, á, í, ó, ú, ñ, Ñ, ¿, ¡

I have attached screen shots to illustrate the problem and solution.

If anyone else is experiencing this problem, I hope this will help.

Hi Peer,

I was wandering around in jira.mariadb.org and found a post with a different problem, but there was information about setting session variables in the connection string.

It solves the issue. 

Note: You cannot just use collation_connection, you have to specify the character_set variables as well

Database Connection > Properties > Driver Properties
Parameter SessionVariables

character_set_client=utf8, character_set_results=utf8, character_set_connection=utf8, collation_connection=latin1_spanish_ci