I use a Python program to write text containing Unicode characters to a
MySQL
database.  As an example, two of the characters are

    u'\u2640' a symbol for Venus or female
    u'\u2642' a symbol for Mars or male

I use utf8mb4 for virtually all character sets involved with MySQL.  Here is
an excerpt from /etc/mysql/my.cnf

    [client]
    default-character-set=utf8mb4

    [mysql]
    default-character-set=utf8mb4

    [mysqld]
    character-set-server =utf8mb4

I'm not sure that the [client] option does anything, but it doesn't seem to
hurt.

In addition, all tables are created with these parameters:

    ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8mb4 COLLATE=utf8mb4_unicode_ci

In all respects except one, the treatment of Unicode works just fine.  I can
write Unicode to database tables, read it, display it, etc., with no
problems.  The exception is mysql, the MySQL Command-Line Tool.  When I
execute a SELECT statement to see rows in a table containing the Venus and
Mars Unicode characters, here is what I see on the screen:

    | Venus     | ♀      |
    | Mars      | ♂      |

What I want to see is this

    | Venus     | ?      |
    | Mars      | ?      |

I get the same behavior with the MySQL Command Line Tool when I run it on
Windows, Mac OS X, and Ubuntu, so I'm pretty sure the problem has to do
with
mysql itself.

Any ideas about how to get the MySQL Command-Line Tool to display Unicode
properly?

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