10.2. Character Sets and Collations in MySQL
The MySQL server can support multiple character sets. To list the
available character sets, use the SHOW CHARACTER
SET statement. A partial listing follows. For more
complete information, see Section 10.9, “Character Sets and Collations That MySQL Supports”.
mysql> SHOW CHARACTER SET;
+----------+-----------------------------+---------------------+--------+
| Charset | Description | Default collation | Maxlen |
+----------+-----------------------------+---------------------+--------+
| big5 | Big5 Traditional Chinese | big5_chinese_ci | 2 |
| dec8 | DEC West European | dec8_swedish_ci | 1 |
| cp850 | DOS West European | cp850_general_ci | 1 |
| hp8 | HP West European | hp8_english_ci | 1 |
| koi8r | KOI8-R Relcom Russian | koi8r_general_ci | 1 |
| latin1 | cp1252 West European | latin1_swedish_ci | 1 |
| latin2 | ISO 8859-2 Central European | latin2_general_ci | 1 |
| swe7 | 7bit Swedish | swe7_swedish_ci | 1 |
| ascii | US ASCII | ascii_general_ci | 1 |
| ujis | EUC-JP Japanese | ujis_japanese_ci | 3 |
| sjis | Shift-JIS Japanese | sjis_japanese_ci | 2 |
| hebrew | ISO 8859-8 Hebrew | hebrew_general_ci | 1 |
| tis620 | TIS620 Thai | tis620_thai_ci | 1 |
| euckr | EUC-KR Korean | euckr_korean_ci | 2 |
| koi8u | KOI8-U Ukrainian | koi8u_general_ci | 1 |
| gb2312 | GB2312 Simplified Chinese | gb2312_chinese_ci | 2 |
| greek | ISO 8859-7 Greek | greek_general_ci | 1 |
| cp1250 | Windows Central European | cp1250_general_ci | 1 |
| gbk | GBK Simplified Chinese | gbk_chinese_ci | 2 |
| latin5 | ISO 8859-9 Turkish | latin5_turkish_ci | 1 |
...
Any given character set always has at least one collation. It may
have several collations. To list the collations for a character
set, use the SHOW COLLATION statement. For
example, to see the collations for the latin1
(cp1252 West European) character set, use this statement to find
those collation names that begin with latin1:
mysql> SHOW COLLATION LIKE 'latin1%';
+---------------------+---------+----+---------+----------+---------+
| Collation | Charset | Id | Default | Compiled | Sortlen |
+---------------------+---------+----+---------+----------+---------+
| latin1_german1_ci | latin1 | 5 | | | 0 |
| latin1_swedish_ci | latin1 | 8 | Yes | Yes | 1 |
| latin1_danish_ci | latin1 | 15 | | | 0 |
| latin1_german2_ci | latin1 | 31 | | Yes | 2 |
| latin1_bin | latin1 | 47 | | Yes | 1 |
| latin1_general_ci | latin1 | 48 | | | 0 |
| latin1_general_cs | latin1 | 49 | | | 0 |
| latin1_spanish_ci | latin1 | 94 | | | 0 |
+---------------------+---------+----+---------+----------+---------+
The latin1 collations have the following
meanings:
Collations have these general characteristics:
Two different character sets cannot have the same collation.
Each character set has one collation that is the
default collation. For example, the
default collation for latin1 is
latin1_swedish_ci. The output for
SHOW CHARACTER SET indicates which
collation is the default for each displayed character set.
There is a convention for collation names: They start with the
name of the character set with which they are associated, they
usually include a language name, and they end with
_ci (case insensitive),
_cs (case sensitive), or
_bin (binary).
