mysql – CJK char set

The list of CJK character sets may vary depending on your MySQL version.
SELECT VERSION();

You can obtain a current list of all the non-Unicode CJK character sets using this query:

SELECT CHARACTER_SET_NAME, DESCRIPTION
FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.CHARACTER_SETS
WHERE DESCRIPTION LIKE ‘%Chinese%’
OR DESCRIPTION LIKE ‘%Japanese%’
OR DESCRIPTION LIKE ‘%Korean%’
ORDER BY CHARACTER_SET_NAME;

People often think that the client character set is always the same as either the server character set or the character set used for display purposes. However, both of these are false assumptions.
You can make sure by using this statement:

SELECT character_set_name, collation_name
FROM information_schema.columns
WHERE table_schema = “test”
AND table_name = “course”
AND column_name = “name”;

To find out what your system settings are:

SHOW VARIABLES LIKE ‘char%’;

Usually it is necessary to change only the client and connection and results settings. There is a simple statement which changes all three at once:

SET NAMES ‘gbk’;

Once the setting is correct, you can make it permanent by editing my.cnf or my.ini. For example you might add lines looking like these:

mac under /etc/my.cnf

[mysqld]
character-set-server=gbk
[client]
default-character-set=gbk

Create a table with one Unicode (ucs2) column and one Chinese (gb2312) column:

CREATE TABLE chTable
(ucs2Col CHAR(3) CHARACTER SET ucs2,
gb2312Col CHAR(3) CHARACTER SET gb2312);

You can obtain the hexadecimal value using:

SELECT ucs2Col, HEX(ucs2Col), gb2312, HEX(gb2312Col) FROM chTable;