MySQL 8 Administrator???s Guide

Character sets

Before going into detail about character sets it is required to understand what a character set actually is, as well as its related terms, right? Let's start with the term itself; the character set is a set of symbols and encoding. Another important term related to character set is collation, the set of rules used for comparing characters. Let's take a simple example to understand the character sets and collation. Consider two alphabets, P and Q, and assign a number to each, so that P=1 and Q=2. Now, assume P is a symbol and 1 is its encoding. Here, the combination of both the letters and their encoding is known as the character set. Now suppose, we want to compare these values; the simplest way is by referring the encoding ...