If you have ever worked with MySQL, you inevitably came across character sets and collations. In this blog post, we will try to give you a more in-depth look at what those two are and how you should use them.
What Are Character Sets and Collations?
Simply put, character sets in MySQL are sets of symbols and encodings - collations are sets of rules for comparing characters in a character set. In other words, character sets are sets of characters that are legal in a string, while collations are a set of rules used to compare characters in a particular character set. Just how each character set has a default collation, character sets can also have several collations. …
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