MySQL Reference Manual

MySQL Localisation and International Usage

The Character Set Used for Data and Sorting

By default, MySQL uses the ISO-8859-1 (Latin1) character set with sorting according to Swedish/Finnish. This is the character set suitable in the USA and Western Europe.

All standard MySQL binaries are compiled with --with-extra-charsets=complex. This will add code to all standard programs to be able to handle latin1 and all multi-byte character sets within the binary. Other character sets will be loaded from a character-set definition file when needed.

The character set determines what characters are allowed in names and how things are sorted by the ORDER BY and GROUP BY clauses of the SELECT statement.

You can change the character set with the --default-character-set option when you start the server. The character sets available depend on the --with-charset=charset and --with-extra-charset= list-of-charset | complex | all options to configure, and the character set configuration files listed in SHAREDIR/charsets/Index. See Section 2.3.3.

If you change the character set when running MySQL (which may also change the sort order), you must run myisamchk -r -q on all tables. Otherwise, your indexes may not be ordered correctly.

When a client connects to a MySQL server, the server sends the default character set in use to the client. The client will switch to use this character set for this connection.

One should use mysql_real_escape_string( ) when escaping strings for a SQL query. mysql_real_escape_string( ...