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Our column is currently collated to latin1_swedish_ci and special unicode characters are, obviously, getting stripped out. We want to be able to accept chars such as U+272A ✪, U+2764 ❤, (see this wikipedia article) etc. I'm leaning towards utf8_unicode_ci, would this collation handle these and other characters? I don't care about speed as this column isn't an index.
MySQL Version: 5.5.28-1
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Unicode Collation Algorithm (UCA) Versions MySQL implements the xxx _unicode_ci collations according to the Unicode Collation Algorithm (UCA) described at http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr10/. The collation uses the version-4.0.
If you're using MySQL 8.0, the default charset is utf8mb4. If you elect to use UTF-8 as your collation, always use utf8mb4 (specifically utf8mb4_unicode_ci). You should not use UTF-8 because MySQL's UTF-8 is different from proper UTF-8 encoding.
MySQL supports multiple Unicode character sets: utf8mb4 : A UTF-8 encoding of the Unicode character set using one to four bytes per character. utf8mb3 : A UTF-8 encoding of the Unicode character set using one to three bytes per character. utf8 : An alias for utf8mb3 .
To change the character set encoding to UTF-8 for the database itself, type the following command at the mysql> prompt. Replace dbname with the database name: Copy ALTER DATABASE dbname CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci; To exit the mysql program, type \q at the mysql> prompt.
The collation is the least of your worries, what you need to think about is the character set for the column/table/database. The collation (rules governing how data is compared and sorted) is just a corollary of that.
MySQL supports several Unicode character sets, utf8 and utf8mb4 being the most interesting. utf8 supports Unicode characters in the BMP, i.e. a subset of all of Unicode. utf8mb4, available since MySQL 5.5.3, supports all of Unicode.
The collation to be used with any of the Unicode encodings is most likely xxx_general_ci or xxx_unicode_ci. The former is a general sorting and comparison algorithm independent of language, the latter is a more complete language independent algorithm supporting more Unicode features (e.g. treating "ß" and "ss" as equivalent), but is therefore also slower.
See https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5/en/charset-unicode-sets.html.
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