Documentation Home
MySQL Globalization
Related Documentation Download this Excerpt
PDF (US Ltr) - 496.2Kb
PDF (A4) - 492.3Kb


MySQL Globalization  /  ...  /  The ucs2 Character Set (UCS-2 Unicode Encoding)

1.9.4 The ucs2 Character Set (UCS-2 Unicode Encoding)

Note

The ucs2 character set is deprecated in MySQL 8.0.28; expect it to be removed in a future MySQL release. Please use utf8mb4 instead.

In UCS-2, every character is represented by a 2-byte Unicode code with the most significant byte first. For example: LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A has the code 0x0041 and it is stored as a 2-byte sequence: 0x00 0x41. CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER YERU (Unicode 0x044B) is stored as a 2-byte sequence: 0x04 0x4B. For Unicode characters and their codes, please refer to the Unicode Consortium website.

The ucs2 character set has these characteristics:

  • Supports BMP characters only (no support for supplementary characters)

  • Uses a fixed-length 16-bit encoding and requires two bytes per character.