Inserting 4-byte unicode characters into MySQL/MariaDB - mysql

Question

When attempting to insert 💩 (for example, which is a 4-byte unicode char), both MySQL (5.7) and MariaDB (10.2/10.3/10.4) give the same error:
Incorrect string value: '\xF0\x9F\x92\xA9'
The statement:
mysql> insert into bob (test) values ('💩');
Here's my database's charset/collation:
mysql> select ##collation_database; +----------------------+
| ##collation_database |
+----------------------+
| utf8mb4_unicode_ci |
+----------------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)
mysql> SELECT ##character_set_database; +--------------------------+
| ##character_set_database |
+--------------------------+
| utf8mb4 |
+--------------------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)
The server's character set:
mysql> show global variables like '%character_set_server%'\G; *************************** 1. row ***************************
Variable_name: character_set_server
Value: utf8mb4
The table:
create table bob ( `test` TEXT NOT NULL );
mysql> SHOW FULL COLUMNS FROM bob;
+-------+------+--------------------+------+-----+---------+-------+---------------------------------+---------+
| Field | Type | Collation | Null | Key | Default | Extra | Privileges | Comment |
+-------+------+--------------------+------+-----+---------+-------+---------------------------------+---------+
| test | text | utf8mb4_unicode_ci | NO | | NULL | | select,insert,update,references | |
+-------+------+--------------------+------+-----+---------+-------+---------------------------------+---------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)
Can anyone point me in the right direction?

Answer 1

Yes, as you commented, you need to use SET NAMES utf8mb4.
Your 4-byte character must pass from your client through the database connection and into a table. All of those must support utf8mb4. If any one of them does not support utf8mb4, then 4-byte characters will not be able to get through.
SET NAMES utf8mb4 makes the database session expect clients to send string using that encoding. The default for character_set_client on MySQL 5.7 is utf8, so you need to set it to utf8mb4.
In MySQL 8.0.1 and later, the default character_set_client is utf8mb4 already, so you won't need to change it.