Best database charset

1. What character set should I use MySQL?
2. What is the best collation for MySQL?
3. What character set should I use?
4. What is collation in phpmyadmin?
5. What is the difference between Latin1 and utf8?
6. What is the difference between utf8 and utf8mb4?
7. Which collation is utf8mb4?
8. How do I convert utf8 to utf8mb4?
9. What is the difference between utf8_general_ci and utf8_unicode_ci?
10. Should I use UTF-8 or UTF-16?
11. Is ascii the same as UTF-8?
12. Does UTF-8 support all languages?

What character set should I use MySQL?

If you're using MySQL 5.7, the default MySQL collation is generally latin1_swedish_ci because MySQL uses latin1 as its default character set. If you're using MySQL 8.0, the default charset is utf8mb4. If you elect to use UTF-8 as your collation, always use utf8mb4 (specifically utf8mb4_unicode_ci).

What is the best collation for MySQL?

0 collations for most uses in MySQL 8.0. The default collation for utf8mb4 in MySQL 8.0 is utf8mb4_0900_ai_ci. This is a good collation for the general use cases, but feel free to use one of the more specific collations if that works better for your application.

What character set should I use?

As a content author or developer, you should nowadays always choose the UTF-8 character encoding for your content or data. This Unicode encoding is a good choice because you can use a single character encoding to handle any character you are likely to need. This greatly simplifies things.

What is collation in phpmyadmin?

A collation is a set of rules that defines how to compare and sort character strings. Every character set has at least one collation. The default character set for MySQL is latin1, with a default database collation of latin1_swedish_ci.

What is the difference between Latin1 and utf8?

2 Answers. UTF-8 is prepared for world domination, Latin1 isn't. If you're trying to store non-Latin characters like Chinese, Japanese, Hebrew, Russian, etc using Latin1 encoding, then they will end up as mojibake. ... Before that version, it only goes up to 3 bytes per character, not 4 bytes per character.

What is the difference between utf8 and utf8mb4?

The difference between utf8 and utf8mb4 is that the former can only store 3 byte characters, while the latter can store 4 byte characters. In Unicode terms, utf8 can only store characters in the Basic Multilingual Plane, while utf8mb4 can store any Unicode character.

Which collation is utf8mb4?

From MySQL 8.0, utf8mb4 is the default character set, and the default collation for utf8mb4 is utf8mb4_0900_ai_ci. MySQL 8.0 is also coming with a whole new set of Unicode collations for the utf8mb4 character set. This will allow use of the complete Unicode 9.0.

How do I convert utf8 to utf8mb4?

Switching from MySQL's utf8 to utf8mb4

1. Step 1: Create a backup. ...
2. Step 2: Upgrade the MySQL server. ...
3. Step 3: Modify databases, tables, and columns. ...
4. Step 4: Check the maximum length of columns and index keys. ...
5. Step 5: Modify connection, client, and server character sets. ...
6. Step 6: Repair and optimize all tables.

What is the difference between utf8_general_ci and utf8_unicode_ci?

Key differences

utf8mb4_unicode_ci is based on the official Unicode rules for universal sorting and comparison, which sorts accurately in a wide range of languages. utf8mb4_general_ci is a simplified set of sorting rules which aims to do as well as it can while taking many short-cuts designed to improve speed.

Should I use UTF-8 or UTF-16?

Therefore, if there are more characters in the range U+0000 to U+007F than there are in the range U+0800 to U+FFFF then UTF-8 is more efficient, while if there are fewer, then UTF-16 is more efficient. If the counts are equal then they are exactly the same size.

Is ascii the same as UTF-8?

For characters represented by the 7-bit ASCII character codes, the UTF-8 representation is exactly equivalent to ASCII, allowing transparent round trip migration. Other Unicode characters are represented in UTF-8 by sequences of up to 6 bytes, though most Western European characters require only 2 bytes³.

Does UTF-8 support all languages?

A Unicode-based encoding such as UTF-8 can support many languages and can accommodate pages and forms in any mixture of those languages. ... There are three different Unicode character encodings: UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32.