Differences between utf8 and latin1

mysql utf-8 installation latin1
binbash picture binbash · Apr 25, 2010 · Viewed 131.4k times · Source

what is the difference between utf8 and latin1?

Answer

BalusC picture BalusC · Apr 25, 2010

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. You may find the introductory text of this article useful (and even more if you know a bit Java).

Note that full 4-byte UTF-8 support was only introduced in MySQL 5.5. Before that version, it only goes up to 3 bytes per character, not 4 bytes per character. So, it supported only the BMP plane and not e.g. the Emoji plane. If you want full 4-byte UTF-8 support, upgrade MySQL to at least 5.5 or go for another RDBMS like PostgreSQL. In MySQL 5.5+ it's called utf8mb4.

Related questions

What's the difference between utf8_general_ci and utf8_unicode_ci?

Between utf8_general_ci and utf8_unicode_ci, are there any differences in terms of performance?

Read More
"Incorrect string value" when trying to insert UTF-8 into MySQL via JDBC?

This is how my connection is set: Connection conn = DriverManager.getConnection(url + dbName + "?useUnicode=true&characterEncoding=utf-8", userName, password); And I'm getting the following error when tyring to add a row to a table: Incorrect string value: '\xF0\…

Read More
SET NAMES utf8 in MySQL?

I often see something similar to this below in PHP scripts using MySQL query("SET NAMES utf8"); I have never had to do this for any project yet so I have a couple basic questions about it. Is this something …

Read More