MySQL unicode literals

Question

I want to insert a record into MySQL that has a non-ASCII Unicode character, but I'm on a terminal that doesn't let me easily type non-ASCII characters. How do I escape a Unicode literal in MySQL's SQL syntax?

Answer 1

See: http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=10199 (Bug #10199: "Allow Unicode escape sequence for string literals.") This request has been "Open" since 2005. More details in Worklog Task #3529: Unicode Escape Sequences.

From https://web.archive.org/web/20091117221116/http://eng.kaching.com/2009/10/mysql-unicode-escape-sequences.html though, you can see the following example, which does actually seem to work, but requires you to know the actual byte-by-byte UTF8 encoding:

You can also use the variable-length UTF-8 representation (convenient when, for example, copying from a utf-8 URL-encoded value like %E2%80%98).

mysql> select _utf8 x'E28098';  
+---+  
| ‘ |  
+---+