Checking Character Set Setting

∟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:\herong> \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 utf8mb4 
     COLLATE utf8mb4_0900_ai_ci */ |
+----------+-------------------------------------------

mysql> SHOW CREATE TABLE Comment_Mixed;
+---------------+----------------------------------------------
| Table         | Create Table
+---------------+----------------------------------------------
| Comment_Mixed | CREATE TABLE `comment_mixed` (
  `Test_Name` varchar(356) DEFAULT NULL,
  `String_ASCII` varchar(256) CHARACTER SET ascii 
     COLLATE ascii_general_ci DEFAULT NULL,
  `String_Latin1` varchar(256) CHARACTER SET latin1 
     COLLATE latin1_swedish_ci DEFAULT NULL,
  `String_UTF8` varchar(256) CHARACTER SET utf8 
     COLLATE utf8_general_ci DEFAULT NULL,
  `String_GBK` varchar(256) CHARACTER SET gbk 
     COLLATE gbk_chinese_ci DEFAULT NULL,
  `String_Big5` varchar(256) CHARACTER SET big5 
     COLLATE big5_chinese_ci DEFAULT NULL
) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8mb4 COLLATE=utf8mb4_0900_ai_ci |
+---------------+----------------------------------------------

Here is what I learned from the output:

The default character set for database "HerongDB" is defined as "utf8mb4".
The default character set for table "comment_mixed" is defined as "utf8mb4".
No character set is explicitly defined for column "Test_Name", so its character set is "utf8mb4" 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".