Checking Character Set Setting

Building Chinese Web Sites using PHP

Dr. Herong Yang, Version 2.11

Building Chinese Web Sites using PHP

∟MySQL - Character Set and Encoding

∟Checking Character Set Setting

This section describes how to check the character set settings of text column in MySQL server.

After created my test table, I used the following SQL Monitor commands to check what character sets are defined for each text column in the table:

C:\>\local\mysql\bin\mysql -u herong -pTopSecret

mysql> USE HerongDB;
Database changed

mysql> SHOW CREATE DATABASE HerongDB;
+----------+-------------------------------------------
| Database | Create Database
+----------+-------------------------------------------
| herongdb | CREATE DATABASE `herongdb` 
   /*!40100 DEFAULT CHARACTER SET latin1 */
+----------+-------------------------------------------

mysql> SHOW CREATE TABLE Comment_Mixed;
+---------------+--------------------------------------
| Table         | Create Table
+---------------+----------------------------------------------
| Comment_Mixed | CREATE TABLE `comment_mixed` (
  `Test_Name` varchar(256) default NULL,
  `String_ASCII` varchar(256) character set ascii default NULL,
  `String_Latin1` varchar(256) default NULL,
  `String_UTF8` varchar(256) character set utf8 default NULL,
  `String_GBK` varchar(256) character set gbk default NULL,
  `String_Big5` varchar(256) character set big5 default NULL
) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1 |
+---------------+----------------------------------------------

Here is what I learned from the output:

The default character set for database "HerongDB" is defined as "latin1".
The default character set for table "comment_mixed" is defined as "latin1".
No character set is explicitly defined for column "Test_Name", so its character set is "latin1" inherited from the table level default character set.
Column "String_ASCII" is explicitly defined to use character set "ascii".
Column "String_Latin1" is explicitly defined to use character set "latin1".
Column "String_UTF8" is explicitly defined to use character set "utf-8".
Column "String_GBK" is explicitly defined to use character set "gbk".
Column "String_Big5 is explicitly defined to use character set "big5".

Table of Contents

About This Book

PHP Installation on Windows Systems

Integrating PHP with Apache Web Server

charset="*" - Encodings on Chinese Web Pages

Chinese Characters in PHP String Literals

Multibyte String Functions in UTF-8 Encoding

Input Text Data from Web Forms

Input Chinese Text Data from Web Forms

MySQL - Installation on Windows

MySQL - Connecting PHP to Database

►MySQL - Character Set and Encoding