West European Character Sets cover most West European languages, such as French, Spanish, Catalan, Basque, Portuguese, Italian, Albanian, Dutch, German, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, Faroese, Icelandic, Irish, Scottish, and English.
latin1 (ISO 8859-1 West European):
+----------------------+----------+----+---------+----------+---------+ | Collation | Charset | Id | Default | Compiled | Sortlen | +----------------------+----------+----+---------+----------+---------+ | latin1_german1_ci | latin1 | 5 | | | 0 | | latin1_swedish_ci | latin1 | 8 | Yes | Yes | 0 | | latin1_danish_ci | latin1 | 15 | | | 0 | | latin1_german2_ci | latin1 | 31 | | Yes | 2 | | latin1_bin | latin1 | 47 | | Yes | 0 | | latin1_general_ci | latin1 | 48 | | | 0 | | latin1_general_cs | latin1 | 49 | | | 0 | | latin1_spanish_ci | latin1 | 94 | | | 0 | +----------------------+----------+----+---------+----------+---------+
The latin1_swedish_ci collation is the default that probably is used by the majority of MySQL customers. It is constantly stated that this is based on the Swedish/Finnish collation rules, but you will find Swedes and Finns who disagree with that statement.
The latin1_german1_ci and latin1_german2_ci collations are based on the DIN-1 and DIN-2 standards, where DIN stands for Deutsches Institut für Normung (that is, the German answer to ANSI). DIN-1 is called the dictionary collation and DIN-2 is called the phone-book collation.
latin1_german1_ci (dictionary) rules:
Ä = A, Ö = O, Ü = U, ß = s
latin1_german2_ci (phone-book) rules:
Ä = AE, Ö = OE, Ü = UE, ß = ss
In the latin1_spanish_ci collation, Ñ (N-tilde) is a separate letter between N and O.
macroman (Mac West European):
+----------------------+----------+----+---------+----------+---------+ | Collation | Charset | Id | Default | Compiled | Sortlen | +----------------------+----------+----+---------+----------+---------+ | macroman_general_ci | macroman | 39 | Yes | | 0 | | macroman_bin | macroman | 53 | | | 0 | +----------------------+----------+----+---------+----------+---------+
cp850 (DOS West European):
+----------------------+----------+----+---------+----------+---------+ | Collation | Charset | Id | Default | Compiled | Sortlen | +----------------------+----------+----+---------+----------+---------+ | cp850_general_ci | cp850 | 4 | Yes | | 0 | | cp850_bin | cp850 | 80 | | | 0 | +----------------------+----------+----+---------+----------+---------+