Table of Contents for

MySQL in a Nutshell, 2nd Edition

This function returns the default character set information for the database given. It uses the MY_CHARSET_INFO structure, so the information may be retrieved with extensions like so:

...
if (!mysql_set_character_set(mysql, "utf8"))
{
 MY_CHARSET_INFO ch_set;
 mysql_get_character_set_info(mysql, &ch_set);
 printf("Character Set: %s\n", ch_set.name);
 printf("Collation: %s\n", ch_set.csname);
 printf("Minimum Length for Multibyte Character: %d\n", ch_set.mbminlen);
 printf("Maximum Length for Multibyte Character: %d\n", ch_set.mbmaxlen);
 printf("Comment: %s\n", ch_set.comment);
 printf("Directory: %s\n", ch_set.dir);
}
...

Here are the results of this code excerpt:

Character Set: utf8_general_ci
Collation: utf8
Minimum Length for Multibyte Character: 1
Maximum Length for Multibyte Character: 3
Comment: UTF-8 Unicode
Directory: (null)