how do I insert unicode characters into mysql with an insert statement?

Question

I'm doing this directly in the mysql client. I want to do the following:

INSERT INTO MYTABLE VALUES(1,12,'\u5c40\u5c42');

So it would insert the two unicode characters. I'd like to do this without using some other programming language if possible, I'd like to just paste my insert statements right into mysql client.

Answer 1

What's the type of your table data? char or varchar? Your issue isn't quite clear, are you getting an error from that line? You might be experiencing: http://dev.hubspot.com/bid/7049/MySQL-and-Unicode-Three-Gotchas.

EDIT:

Quite a bit of information is within these three pages that should be able to help: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5/en/charset-unicode.html

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5/en/string-syntax.html

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5/en/charset-literal.html

but I also saw this :

INSERT INTO mytable VALUES (1, 12, _ucs2'\x5C40\x5C42');

Answer 2

Using the mysql console, I can just paste your unicode characters into an insert command and mysql accepts it. Here's a little test I did using your data:

CREATE TABLE xx (col1 varchar(20));
insert into xx values ('局层');
select * from xx;
+---------+
| col1    |
+---------+
| 局层   |
+---------+

My db uses default encoding (latin1).

Have you tried just pasting them in? What error, if any, do you get?