[Solved] MySQL not decoding emojis and special characters

If you have this problem, you should check 4 things.

Encoding of tables

Open PhpMyAdmin and check whether the database is encoded with utf8mb4_unicode_ci and also all the columns have the same encodign or not

Encoding of MySQL

If you are on Linux, go to /etc/mysql/my.cnf and add or edit the following:

[client]
default-character-set=utf8mb4

[mysql]
default-character-set=utf8mb4

[mysqld]
collation-server = utf8mb4_unicode_ci
init-connect='SET NAMES utf8mb4'
character-set-server = utf8mb4

Then restart mysql:

$ sudo service mysqld restart

Encoding in connection

If you are using PHP to connect, add the encoding just after the connection in this way:

$conn = new mysqli($servername, $username, $password, $db);
$conn->query("SET NAMES 'utf8mb4'");

Encoding in frontend

If you are running on HTML try to put this meta tag

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">

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