SHOW CHARACTER SET
SHOW CHARACTER SET [LIKE 'pattern'| WHEREexpression]
This statement will show all of the character sets installed
on the server. To be more selective, use a pattern with the LIKE clause and the wildcard characters (i.e., % and
_). Or you may use the WHERE
clause to refine the results set. For instance, to list all of the
character sets beginning with the name latin,
enter the following:
SHOW CHARACTER SET LIKE 'latin%'\G
*************************** 1. row ***************************
Charset: latin1
Description: ISO 8859-1 West European
Default collation: latin1_swedish_ci
Maxlen: 1
*************************** 2. row ***************************
Charset: latin2
Description: ISO 8859-2 Central European
Default collation: latin2_general_ci
Maxlen: 1
*************************** 3. row ***************************
Charset: latin5
Description: ISO 8859-9 Turkish
Default collation: latin5_turkish_ci
Maxlen: 1
*************************** 4. row ***************************
Charset: latin7
Description: ISO 8859-13 Baltic
Default collation: latin7_general_ci
Maxlen: 1To see the default character set, use the SHOW
VARIABLES statement. To change the client’s character set, use the
SET CHARACTER SET statement. The Default
collation field in the results indicates the related
collation for the character set. The Maxlen field
gives the maximum number of bytes for storing one character of the
character set. For European character sets, this value is usually 1;
for Asian character sets, it’s usually more than 1.