utf8
is an alias for the utf8mb3
character set. For more information, see Section 10.9.2, “The utf8mb3 Character Set (3-Byte UTF-8 Unicode Encoding)”.
The utf8mb3
character set is deprecated and you should expect it to be removed in a future MySQL release. Please use utf8mb4
instead. Although utf8
is currently an alias for utf8mb3
, at some point utf8
is expected to become a reference to utf8mb4
. To avoid ambiguity about the meaning of utf8
, consider specifying utf8mb4
explicitly for character set references instead of utf8
.