Taken from the MySQL 8.0 Reference Manual:
utf8mb4
: A UTF-8 encoding of the Unicode character set using one to four bytes per character.
utf8mb3
: A UTF-8 encoding of the Unicode character set using one to three bytes per character.
In MySQL utf8
is currently an alias for utf8mb3
which is deprecated and will be removed in a future MySQL release. At that point utf8
will become a reference to utf8mb4
.
So regardless of this alias, you can consciously set yourself an utf8mb4
encoding.
To complete the answer, I'd like to add the @WilliamEntriken's comment below (also taken from the manual):
To avoid ambiguity about the meaning of
utf8
, consider specifyingutf8mb4
explicitly for character set references instead ofutf8
.