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9.1.1 Character Sets and Collations in General »
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9.1. Character Set Support

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9.1.1. Character Sets and Collations in General
9.1.2. Character Sets and Collations in MySQL
9.1.3. Specifying Character Sets and Collations
9.1.4. Connection Character Sets and Collations
9.1.5. Configuring the Character Set and Collation for Applications
9.1.6. Character Set for Error Messages
9.1.7. Collation Issues
9.1.8. Operations Affected by Character Set Support
9.1.9. Unicode Support
9.1.10. UTF-8 for Metadata
9.1.11. Upgrading Character Sets from MySQL 4.0
9.1.12. Character Sets and Collations That MySQL Supports

Improved support for character set handling was added to MySQL in version 4.1. This support enables you to store data using a variety of character sets and perform comparisons according to a variety of collations. You can specify character sets at the server, database, table, and column level. MySQL supports the use of character sets for the MyISAM, MEMORY, and (as of MySQL 4.1.2) InnoDB storage engines. The ISAM storage engine does not include character set support; there are no plans to change this, because ISAM is deprecated.

Note

The NDBCLUSTER storage engine in MySQL 4.1 (available beginning with MySQL 4.1.3-Max) provides limited character set and collation support; see Section 15.1.4, “Known Limitations of MySQL Cluster”.

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

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 9.1.5, “Configuring the Character Set and Collation for Applications”, and Section 9.1.4, “Connection Character Sets and Collations”.