In today's globalized world, databases need to be able to handle data from different language and cultural backgrounds. This is the importance of character set and character order settings in database management.
By using the multilingual data of the "Three Kingdoms" game as an example, this article will introduce in detail the application and settings of character sets and character sequences in the MySQL database.
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Character set and character order settings
A character set is a collection of unique characters. Each character is represented in the database by one or more bytes. Character order is a rule for sorting and comparing characters.
In the game "Three Kingdoms", suppose there is a database used to store player information, including the player's username and their chosen power (for example, Shu, Wei, Wu). Since the game is available in multiple languages, usernames may be stored in different character sets (e.g. UTF-8, GBK, etc.).
Character set and character order concepts
The character set determines how characters are stored in the database and how they are retrieved from the database. For example, the UTF-8 character set can be used to store any Unicode character, which is very useful for storing multilingual data.
Use the following command to view the character set used by the current MySQL service instance.
show variables