MySQL 8.0 Reference Manual Including MySQL NDB Cluster 8.0

10.9.3 The utf8 Character Set (Alias for utf8mb3)

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)”.

Note

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.