COLLATION 'utf8_general_ci' is not valid for CHARACTER SET 'latin1'

Question

I am trying to fix a character encoding issue - previously we had the collation set for this column utf8_general_ci which caused issues because it is accent insensitive..

I'm trying to find all the entries in the database that could have been affected.

set names utf8; select * from table1 t1 join table2 t2 on (t1.pid=t2.pid and t1.id != t2.id) collate utf8_general_ci; 

However, this generates the error:

ERROR 1253 (42000): COLLATION 'utf8_general_ci' is not valid for CHARACTER SET 'latin1' 

1. The database is now defined with DEFAULT CHARACTER SET utf8
2. The table is defined with CHARSET=utf8
3. The "pid" column is defined with: CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_bin NOT NULL
4. The server version is Server version: 5.5.37-MariaDB-0ubuntu0.14.04.1 (Ubuntu)

Question: Why am I getting an error about latin1 when latin1 doesn't seem to be present anywhere in the table / schema definition?

MariaDB [(none)]> SHOW VARIABLES LIKE '%char%'; +--------------------------+----------------------------+ | Variable_name            | Value                      | +--------------------------+----------------------------+ | character_set_client     | utf8                       | | character_set_connection | utf8                       | | character_set_database   | latin1                     | | character_set_filesystem | binary                     | | character_set_results    | utf8                       | | character_set_server     | latin1                     | | character_set_system     | utf8                       | | character_sets_dir       | /usr/share/mysql/charsets/ | +--------------------------+----------------------------+ 8 rows in set (0.00 sec)  MariaDB [(none)]> SHOW VARIABLES LIKE '%collation%'; +----------------------+-------------------+ | Variable_name        | Value             | +----------------------+-------------------+ | collation_connection | utf8_general_ci   | | collation_database   | latin1_swedish_ci | | collation_server     | latin1_swedish_ci | +----------------------+-------------------+ 

Answer 1

Firstly run this query

SHOW VARIABLES LIKE '%char%'; 

You have character_set_server='latin1'

If so,go into your config file,my.cnf and add or uncomment these lines:

character-set-server = utf8 collation-server = utf8_unicode_ci 

Restart the server. Yes late to the party,just encountered the same issue.

Answer 2

The same error is produced in MariaDB (10.1.36-MariaDB) by using the combination of parenthesis and the COLLATE statement. My SQL was different, the error was the same, I had:

SELECT * FROM table1 WHERE (field = 'STRING') COLLATE utf8_bin; 

Omitting the parenthesis was solving it for me.

SELECT * FROM table1 WHERE field = 'STRING' COLLATE utf8_bin;