Character Sets

ASCII has been the default character set for a long time as it was the first character set that was standardized and has been in use for many other programming languages as well.

we can use the ascii(e) function to find the ASCII value of any character, similarly we can use char(101) to convert any ASCII integer value to a ASCII character. As computers began to become popular in other regions apart from the US and Europe, it was increasingly difficult to manage all the various non-standard characters. Hence Unicode Text Format - UTF was introduced, as new characters we required we have newer versions of Unicode that would cater this and accommodate all possible characters in existence, it is a 32 bit format for each character.

SHOW server_encoding;

The above command shows the server character set encoding