Configuring for Internationalization

Two options to mysqld allow you to set the default character set and collation. The character set is the set of symbols used by default on the server. The collation is the set of rules for performing comparisons ”that is, the sort order ”on the character set, which varies from country to country.

You can set the default character set with the --default- character-set option. Each character set has an associated default collation, but you can specify another one with the -- default-collation option. If the combination of default character set and default collation is not valid, mysqld will give you an error message.

The default character set, if these options are not specified, is latin1, and the default collation is latin1_swedish_ci . This character set can also be described as ISO-8859-1 West European, which is the one used in this book. The collation represents the sort order for latin1 used by the Swedes and Finns. (If you are a monolinugal English speaker, you may not know that different groups who use the same character set you use sort vowels into different orders.) There are also collations for latin1 that represent the ways that Germans, Danes, and Norwegians sort strings.

For more information on the character sets supported by MySQL, especially if you are looking for one in particular, consult the MySQL manual.