Character Set

MySQL has a very flexible character set support as documented in Character Set Support.

The list of character sets and their IDs can be queried as follows:

  SELECT id, collation_name FROM information_schema.collations ORDER BY id;
  +----+-------------------+
  | id | collation_name    |
  +----+-------------------+
  |  1 | big5_chinese_ci   |
  |  2 | latin2_czech_cs   |
  |  3 | dec8_swedish_ci   |
  |  4 | cp850_general_ci  |
  |  5 | latin1_german1_ci |
  |  6 | hp8_english_ci    |
  |  7 | koi8r_general_ci  |
  |  8 | latin1_swedish_ci |
  |  9 | latin2_general_ci |
  | 10 | swe7_swedish_ci   |
  +----+-------------------+

The following table shows a few common character sets.

Number	Hex	Character Set Name
8	0x08	latin1_swedish_ci
33	0x21	utf8mb3_general_ci
63	0x3f	binary

Protocol::CharacterSet

A character set is defined in the protocol as a integer. Fields:

• charset_nr (2) – number of the character set and collation