MySQL Manual
4 Database Administration
4.6.1 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-charsets=
list-of-charset | complex | all | none options to configure, and the
character set configuration files listed in
`SHAREDIR/charsets/Index'. See section 2.3.3 Typical configure Options.
If you change the character set when running MySQL (which may
also change the sort order), you must run myisamchk -r -q
--set-character-set=charset 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 an SQL query. mysql_real_escape_string() is identical to the
old mysql_escape_string() function, except that it takes the MYSQL
connection handle as the first parameter.
If the client is compiled with different paths than where the server is installed and the user who configured MySQL didn't include all character sets in the MySQL binary, one must specify for the client where it can find the additional character sets it will need if the server runs with a different character set than the client.
One can specify this by putting in a MySQL option file:
[client] character-sets-dir=/usr/local/mysql/share/mysql/charsets
where the path points to the directory in which the dynamic MySQL character sets are stored.
One can force the client to use specific character set by specifying:
[client] default-character-set=character-set-name
but normally this is never needed.
