National Character Sets and Unicode

Table of Contents

122. Character Sets and Collations in General
123. Character Sets and Collations in MySQL
124. Determining the Default Character Set and Collation
Server Character Set and Collation
Database Character Set and Collation
Table Character Set and Collation
Column Character Set and Collation
Examples of Character Set and Collation Assignment
Example 1: Table + Column Definition
Example 2: Table + Column Definition
Example 3: Table + Column Definition
Example 4: Database + Table + Column Definition
Connection Character Sets and Collations
Character String Literal Character Set and Collation
COLLATE Clause in Various Parts of an SQL Query
COLLATE Clause Precedence
BINARY Operator
Some Special Cases Where the Collation Determination is Tricky
Collations Must Be for the Right Character Set
An example of the Effect of Collation
125. Operations Affected by Character Set Support
Result Strings
CONVERT()
CAST()
SHOW CHARACTER SET
SHOW COLLATION
SHOW CREATE DATABASE
SHOW FULL COLUMNS
126. Unicode Support
127. UTF8 for Metadata
128. Compatibility with Other DBMSs
129. New Character Set Configuration File format
130. National Character Set
131. Upgrading from MySQL 4.0
4.0 Character Sets and Corresponding 4.1 Character Set/Collation Pairs
132. The Character Sets and Collations that MySQL Supports
The Unicode Character Sets
Platform Specific Character Sets
Character Sets for South Europe and Middle East
The Asian Character Sets
The Baltic Character Sets
The Cyrillic Character Sets
The Central European Character Sets
The West European Character Sets

Improved handling of character sets is one of the features added to MySQL in Version 4.1. This chapter explains:

The features described here are as implemented in MySQL 4.1.1. (MySQL 4.1.0 has some but not all of these features, and some of them are implemented differently.)

Character set support currently is included in the MySISAM and MEMORY (HEAP) storage engines. The InnoDB storage engine does not yet include it. ISAM does not; there are no plans to do so.