Non ASCII Characters with MySQL

Part:   1  2  3 

(Continued from previous part...)

If you run it, you will get:

Default settings...
    character_set_client   latin1
    character_set_connection   latin1
    character_set_database   latin1
    character_set_results   latin1
    character_set_server   latin1
    character_set_system   utf8
    character_sets_dir   C:\local\MySQL\share\charsets/

Updated settings...
    character_set_client   utf8
    character_set_connection   utf8
    character_set_database   latin1
    character_set_results   utf8
    character_set_server   latin1
    character_set_system   utf8
    character_sets_dir   C:\local\MySQL\share\charsets/

Creating a table in UTF-8...

Inserting some rows to the table...

Query some rows from the table...
   ID   Message
    1   Hello!=(\x48656c6c6f21)
    2   -íHola!=(\xc2a1486f6c6121)
    3   S+ásŃ+!=(\xe4bda0e5a5bd21)

MySQL works as we expected, no conversion on the SQL statements, storing strings in UTF-8, and no conversion on query result.

Conclusion

• MySQL provides a good support on non ASCII characters. If offers a number of encodings (character sets).
• MySQL allows to specify encodings at database, table or column level.
• MySQL allows to control encoding conversions on receiving SQL statements and returning query results.
• My recommendation is to use UTF-8 to all text information, turn off MySQL encoding conversion on receiving SQL statements and returning query results, and let your PHP script to handle UTF-8 strings.

Part:   1  2  3