title: How to replace/remove 4(+)-byte characters from a UTF-8 string in Java?
body: <p>Because MySQL 5.1 does not support 4 byte UTF-8 sequences, I need to replace/drop the 4 byte sequences in these strings.</p>
  
  <p>I'm looking a clean way to replace these characters.</p>
  
  <p>Apache libraries are replacing the characters with a question-mark is fine for this case, although ASCII equivalent would be nicer, of course.</p>
  
  <p>N.B. The input is from external sources (e-mail names) and upgrading the database is not a solution at this point in time.</p>