MySQL has a very flexible character set support as documented in Character Sets, Collations, Unicode. 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 |
utf8_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