Managing & Using MySQL, 2nd Edition

Simple Character Sets

Additional character sets may be configured into MySQL if they don’t require multi-byte character support or string collating routines. Adding a character set through configuration requires the following steps:

1. Add the new character set to the file sql/share/charsets/Index ^[1]

2. Create the configuration file for the new character set in sql/share/charsets.

3. Edit your configure.in file to include the character set in the next compile.

4. Recompile MySQL.

In this example, we will add a special character set called elvish. We first need to add it to the character set index file. The file looks like this:

$ cat sql/share/charsets/Index
# sql/share/charsets/Index
#
# This file lists all of the available character sets. Please keep this
# file sorted by character set number.


big5               1
czech              2
dec8               3
.
.
.
latin5            30
latin1_de         31

To add a new character set, simply add the character set to the end of the file with a unique index:

latin5            30
latin1_de         31
elvish            32

The next step is to create a configuration file in sql/share/charsets for your character set. You can base it on sql/share/charsets/latin1.conf.

$ cd sql/share/charsets
$ cp latin1.conf elvish.conf
$ vi elvish.conf

There are four array definitions in the configuration file. You need to edit each of these arrays to configure your character set. A # in the configuration file indicates a comment.

ctype

The ctype array^[2] defines the features of each character in the character set. It consists of 257 hexadecimal words. Each ...