Problem with character encoding?

Question

I have a webpage containing a textarea. Users can enter some text or update existing text in the textarea and hit the save button. On submit the value of the text area is sent to a bean and then written to an Oracle 10g database. The page is then refreshed and the newly updated data is shown in the textarea.
The problem is that users sometimes enter the trademark symbol into the textarea. They do this by entering ™ which is the correct way of doing this. This is saved to the database ok. When the page refreshes the textarea displays the trademark symbol instead of ™ This is not a problem. However any subsequent editing and saving of the textarea fails. Looking at the data in the bean (from the textarea) the trademark is show as a (?) in the string. When saving this to the database this error occurs:
java.sql.SQLException: Cannot map Unicode to Oracle character.
If i change the trademark symbol to ™ it saves to the database fine. When the page is refreshed it displays the trademark symbol instead of ™ and will no longer save to the database.
Phew! hope that is clear!

Answer 1

So it's like if you had, I dunno, say a discussion forum site, and people could use HTML escapes to include special characters in their posts, but if someone quoted the original post in their reply, they would see in the textarea the actual character instead of the escape sequence that the original poster used? I can see how you would want to fix that right away, because it would make it look like your site was being run by a bunch of apathetic morons. But if you don't feel like exercising your brain that much, you can just add a bunch of bells and whistles that nobody asked for, like smilies and html formatting (in the subject line as well as the message body). If that doesn't work, introduce a system where people can assign stars to posters who give good answers. That will make your users forget all about your site's little technical glitches, guaranteed.