Discover collation of a MySQL column

Question

I previously created a MySQL table and now I want to find out what collation some of the fields are using. What SQL or MySQL commands can I use to discover this?

Answer 1

You could use SHOW FULL COLUMNS FROM tablename which returns a column Collation, for example for a table 'accounts' with a special collation on the column 'name'

mysql> SHOW FULL COLUMNS FROM accounts;
+----------+--------------+-------------------+------+-----+---------+----------+
| Field    | Type         | Collation         | Null | Key | Default | Extra    |
+----------+--------------+-------------------+------+-----+---------+----------|
| id       | int(11)      | NULL              | NO   | PRI | NULL    | auto_inc |
| name     | varchar(255) | utf8_bin          | YES  |     | NULL    |          |
| email    | varchar(255) | latin1_swedish_ci | YES  |     | NULL    |          |
...

Or you could use SHOW CREATE TABLE tablename which will result in a statement like

mysql> SHOW CREATE TABLE accounts;
CREATE TABLE `accounts` (
`id` int(11) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
`name` varchar(255) CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_bin DEFAULT NULL,
`email` varchar(255) DEFAULT NULL,
...