Finding out the encoding of a MySQL databaseEdit

Created , updated

Once logged in to MySQL you can find out the text encoding of the current database as follows:

mysql> SHOW VARIABLES LIKE "character\_set\_database";
+------------------------+--------+
| Variable_name          | Value  |
+------------------------+--------+
| character_set_database | latin1 |
+------------------------+--------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

Or more verbosely:

mysql> SHOW VARIABLES LIKE 'character\_set\_%';
+--------------------------+--------+
| Variable_name            | Value  |
+--------------------------+--------+
| character_set_client     | latin1 |
| character_set_connection | latin1 |
| character_set_database   | latin1 |
| character_set_results    | latin1 |
| character_set_server     | latin1 |
| character_set_system     | utf8   |
+--------------------------+--------+
6 rows in set (0.00 sec)

You can find out the character set on a specific table in a database as follows:

mysql> SHOW CREATE TABLE the_table;

The output should include information such as:

ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8

See also