MySQL database 5.7.7 or newer (see Supported platforms).Is latin1_swedish_ci (notice the “_ci” at the end).įor a case-sensitive collation, go for latin1_general_cs or latin1_bin.To migrate to 4-byte UTF8 character encoding, you will need the following: The default collation for latin1 encoding “case-sensitive”, is experimental and might not work for you). Ignores case but not accents ( utf8_general_cs, for There doesn’t seem to be a collation that If you care about accents, go for utf8_bin (or utf8mb4_bin).Ĭareful, it’s also case-sensitive. With such aĬollation, lower/upper case and accents will be ignored in your searches and “case insensitive” and implicitly also “accents insensitive”.

Notice the “_ci” part at the end? It means Usually go with utf8_general_ci (or utf8mb4_general_ci with utf8mb4). If a query for “deja vu” should match records like “déjà vu”, you’ll want an If a query for “hello” should match records like “HeLLo”, you’ll want a Here, you need to focus and get confirmed for the following points. WHERE clause checking for equality or like clause, or with unique constraints How to choose your MySQL collationĪgain, the collation is used while comparing data. Now, I am moving towards MySQL collation. So if a column was of varchar(256) in utf8, it should now be varchar(191) in utf8mb4. That changes the maximum length a column or index can hold. It adds an extra byte to store special characters like smileys. Utf8mb4 is actually the real 4-byte utf8 encoding, so holds 4 bytes per character. This means UTF-8 can only hold 3 bytes per character. In utf8, a character can be encoded in a maximum of 3 bytes. NB: a note of warning when migrating from utf8 to utf8mb4. If you don’t want any of such special characters then you can simply go with the default, latin1 encoding. utf8mb4 encoding is supported since MySQL 5.5.3. Be careful with utf8 encoding, this encoding does not support smileys, so if you want to save such data go for the other one. If you need to handle special characters, like letters with accents, people will usually suggest you to opt for utf8 encoding. Choosing one of them is such a big task so go for some appropriate ones. There is a lot of encodings available and supported in MySQL. Let’s start with encoding How to choose your MySQL

Mysql character encoding list