Character sets and collations
A character set describes how symbols for a specific language or dialect are encoded. A collation contains rules to compare and sort the characters of a character set. The character set used to store our data may be different from the one used to display it, leading to data discrepancies. Thus, a need to transform the data arises.
Since MySQL 4.1.x, the MySQL server does the character recoding work for us. Also, MySQL enables us to indicate the character set and collation for each database, each table, and even each field. A default character set for a database applies to each of its tables, unless it is overridden at the table level. The same principle applies to every column.
Effective character sets and collations ...
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