Hi Bill,
I got similar problem as yours. In my case, Moodle 3.3.2 runs on Win10 under XAMPP.
to solve UTF-8 problem, I editted my.ini file with following steps:
1. under [client] section: add this new line default-character-set = utf8mb4
2. under [mysqld] section: add these three lines
- innodb_file_format = Barracuda
- innodb_file_per_table = 1
- innodb_large_prefix
3. still under [mysqld] section change the value as follow:
- character_set_server=utf8mb4
- collation_server=utf8mb4_unicode_ci
- skip-character-set-client-handshake -->THIS ONE JUST REMOVED THE SEMICOLON
4. under [mysql] section change the value to utf8mb4
- default-character-set = utf8mb4
Hopefully it can help. anyway I found the above solution somewhere in moodleforum but I forgot under which topics.
Fjunus