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MySQL 5.7 Reference Manual  /  Character Sets, Collations, Unicode

Chapter 10 Character Sets, Collations, Unicode

Table of Contents

10.1 Character Sets and Collations in General
10.2 Character Sets and Collations in MySQL
10.2.1 Character Set Repertoire
10.2.2 UTF-8 for Metadata
10.3 Specifying Character Sets and Collations
10.3.1 Collation Naming Conventions
10.3.2 Server Character Set and Collation
10.3.3 Database Character Set and Collation
10.3.4 Table Character Set and Collation
10.3.5 Column Character Set and Collation
10.3.6 Character String Literal Character Set and Collation
10.3.7 The National Character Set
10.3.8 Character Set Introducers
10.3.9 Examples of Character Set and Collation Assignment
10.3.10 Compatibility with Other DBMSs
10.4 Connection Character Sets and Collations
10.5 Configuring Application Character Set and Collation
10.6 Error Message Character Set
10.7 Column Character Set Conversion
10.8 Collation Issues
10.8.1 Using COLLATE in SQL Statements
10.8.2 COLLATE Clause Precedence
10.8.3 Character Set and Collation Compatibility
10.8.4 Collation Coercibility in Expressions
10.8.5 The binary Collation Compared to _bin Collations
10.8.6 Examples of the Effect of Collation
10.8.7 Using Collation in INFORMATION_SCHEMA Searches
10.9 Unicode Support
10.9.1 The utf8mb4 Character Set (4-Byte UTF-8 Unicode Encoding)
10.9.2 The utf8mb3 Character Set (3-Byte UTF-8 Unicode Encoding)
10.9.3 The utf8 Character Set (Alias for utf8mb3)
10.9.4 The ucs2 Character Set (UCS-2 Unicode Encoding)
10.9.5 The utf16 Character Set (UTF-16 Unicode Encoding)
10.9.6 The utf16le Character Set (UTF-16LE Unicode Encoding)
10.9.7 The utf32 Character Set (UTF-32 Unicode Encoding)
10.9.8 Converting Between 3-Byte and 4-Byte Unicode Character Sets
10.10 Supported Character Sets and Collations
10.10.1 Unicode Character Sets
10.10.2 West European Character Sets
10.10.3 Central European Character Sets
10.10.4 South European and Middle East Character Sets
10.10.5 Baltic Character Sets
10.10.6 Cyrillic Character Sets
10.10.7 Asian Character Sets
10.10.8 The Binary Character Set
10.11 Restrictions on Character Sets
10.12 Setting the Error Message Language
10.13 Adding a Character Set
10.13.1 Character Definition Arrays
10.13.2 String Collating Support for Complex Character Sets
10.13.3 Multi-Byte Character Support for Complex Character Sets
10.14 Adding a Collation to a Character Set
10.14.1 Collation Implementation Types
10.14.2 Choosing a Collation ID
10.14.3 Adding a Simple Collation to an 8-Bit Character Set
10.14.4 Adding a UCA Collation to a Unicode Character Set
10.15 Character Set Configuration
10.16 MySQL Server Locale Support

MySQL includes character set support that enables you to store data using a variety of character sets and perform comparisons according to a variety of collations. The default MySQL server character set and collation are latin1 and latin1_swedish_ci, but you can specify character sets at the server, database, table, column, and string literal levels.

This chapter discusses the following topics:

  • What are character sets and collations?

  • The multiple-level default system for character set assignment.

  • Syntax for specifying character sets and collations.

  • Affected functions and operations.

  • Unicode support.

  • The character sets and collations that are available, with notes.

  • Selecting the language for error messages.

  • Selecting the locale for day and month names.

Character set issues affect not only data storage, but also communication between client programs and the MySQL server. If you want the client program to communicate with the server using a character set different from the default, you'll need to indicate which one. For example, to use the utf8 Unicode character set, issue this statement after connecting to the server:

SET NAMES 'utf8';

For more information about configuring character sets for application use and character set-related issues in client/server communication, see Section 10.5, “Configuring Application Character Set and Collation”, and Section 10.4, “Connection Character Sets and Collations”.