MySQL Manual
8 National Character Sets and Unicode in MySQL 4.1
- 8.1 Character Sets and Collations in General
- 8.2 Character Sets and Collations in MySQL
- 8.3 Determining The Default Character Set And Collation
- 8.4 Operations Affected by Character Set Support
- 8.5 Unicode Support
- 8.6 UTF8 for Metadata
- 8.7 Compatibility with Other DBMSs
- 8.8 New Character Set Configuration File format
- 8.9 National Character Set
- 8.10 Upgrading from MySQL 4.0
- 8.11 The Character Sets and Collations that MySQL Supports
8.2 Character Sets and Collations in MySQL
A character set always has at least one collation. It may have several collations.
For example, character set latin1 (``ISO-8859-1 West
European'') has the following collations:
| Collation | Meaning |
latin1_bin | Binary according to latin1 encoding
|
latin1_danish_ci | Danish/Norwegian |
latin1_german1_ci | German DIN-1 |
latin1_german2_ci | German DIN-2 |
latin1_swedish_ci | Swedish/Finnish |
latin1_general_ci | Multilingual |
Notes:
- Two different character sets can't have the same collation.
- Each character set has one collation that is the default
collation. For example, the default collation for
latin1islatin1_swedish_ci.
Notice that there is a convention for collation names: They start
with the name of the character set they are associated with, they
usually include a language name, and they end with _ci (case
insensitive), _cs (case sensitive), or _bin (binary).
