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MySQL | Collations

schedule Aug 11, 2023
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A collation is a set of rules that defines how to compare and sort characters in a character set. A collation can only belong to a single character set, however, a character set can have many collations.

Collations assign a weight to each character in a character set. This allows for comparison between character strings where equal weights imply equal strings.

Each character set has a default collation in MySQL. This can be confirmed using:

SHOW CHARACTER SET;
+----------+---------------------------------+---------------------+--------+
| Charset | Description | Default collation | Maxlen |
+----------+---------------------------------+---------------------+--------+
| armscii8 | ARMSCII-8 Armenian | armscii8_general_ci | 1 |
| ascii | US ASCII | ascii_general_ci | 1 |
| big5 | Big5 Traditional Chinese | big5_chinese_ci | 2 |
| binary | Binary pseudo charset | binary | 1 |
| cp1250 | Windows Central European | cp1250_general_ci | 1 |
| cp1251 | Windows Cyrillic | cp1251_general_ci | 1 |
| cp1256 | Windows Arabic | cp1256_general_ci | 1 |
| cp1257 | Windows Baltic | cp1257_general_ci | 1 |
| cp850 | DOS West European | cp850_general_ci | 1 |
| cp852 | DOS Central European | cp852_general_ci | 1 |
| cp866 | DOS Russian | cp866_general_ci | 1 |
| cp932 | SJIS for Windows Japanese | cp932_japanese_ci | 2 |
| dec8 | DEC West European | dec8_swedish_ci | 1 |
| eucjpms | UJIS for Windows Japanese | eucjpms_japanese_ci | 3 |
| euckr | EUC-KR Korean | euckr_korean_ci | 2 |
| gb18030 | China National Standard GB18030 | gb18030_chinese_ci | 4 |
| gb2312 | GB2312 Simplified Chinese | gb2312_chinese_ci | 2 |
| gbk | GBK Simplified Chinese | gbk_chinese_ci | 2 |
| geostd8 | GEOSTD8 Georgian | geostd8_general_ci | 1 |
| greek | ISO 8859-7 Greek | greek_general_ci | 1 |
| hebrew | ISO 8859-8 Hebrew | hebrew_general_ci | 1 |
| hp8 | HP West European | hp8_english_ci | 1 |
| keybcs2 | DOS Kamenicky Czech-Slovak | keybcs2_general_ci | 1 |
| koi8r | KOI8-R Relcom Russian | koi8r_general_ci | 1 |
| koi8u | KOI8-U Ukrainian | koi8u_general_ci | 1 |
| latin1 | cp1252 West European | latin1_swedish_ci | 1 |
| latin2 | ISO 8859-2 Central European | latin2_general_ci | 1 |
| latin5 | ISO 8859-9 Turkish | latin5_turkish_ci | 1 |
| latin7 | ISO 8859-13 Baltic | latin7_general_ci | 1 |
| macce | Mac Central European | macce_general_ci | 1 |
| macroman | Mac West European | macroman_general_ci | 1 |
| sjis | Shift-JIS Japanese | sjis_japanese_ci | 2 |
| swe7 | 7bit Swedish | swe7_swedish_ci | 1 |
| tis620 | TIS620 Thai | tis620_thai_ci | 1 |
| ucs2 | UCS-2 Unicode | ucs2_general_ci | 2 |
| ujis | EUC-JP Japanese | ujis_japanese_ci | 3 |
| utf16 | UTF-16 Unicode | utf16_general_ci | 4 |
| utf16le | UTF-16LE Unicode | utf16le_general_ci | 4 |
| utf32 | UTF-32 Unicode | utf32_general_ci | 4 |
| utf8 | UTF-8 Unicode | utf8_general_ci | 3 |
| utf8mb4 | UTF-8 Unicode | utf8mb4_0900_ai_ci | 4 |
+----------+---------------------------------+---------------------+--------+

You can also check all collations for a given character set:

SHOW COLLATION LIKE 'ascii%';
+------------------+---------+----+---------+----------+---------+---------------+
| Collation | Charset | Id | Default | Compiled | Sortlen | Pad_attribute |
+------------------+---------+----+---------+----------+---------+---------------+
| ascii_bin | ascii | 65 | | Yes | 1 | PAD SPACE |
| ascii_general_ci | ascii | 11 | Yes | Yes | 1 | PAD SPACE |
+------------------+---------+----+---------+----------+---------+---------------+

Here we check all the collations for the ascii character set.

robocat
Published by Arthur Yanagisawa
Edited by 0 others
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