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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-24T00:20:03+00:00

I have a table ‘ABC’ (charset = utf8) and these are my character set

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I have a table ‘ABC’ (charset = utf8) and these are my character set variable values
[mysql version 4.1.23 – Server] and Client version – 3.23.57


mysql> show variables like 'character%';

+--------------------------+------------------------------------+
| Variable_name            | Value                              |
+--------------------------+------------------------------------+
| character_set_client     | latin1                             |
| character_set_connection | latin1                             |
| character_set_database   | latin1                             |
| character_set_results    | latin1                             |
| character_set_server     | latin1                             |
| character_set_system     | utf8                               |
| character_sets_dir       | /home/y/share/mysql/charsets/      |
+--------------------------+------------------------------------+
7 rows in set (0.00 sec)

Now if I run a query in mysql client

mysql>select * into outfile '/tmp/a' from ABC;
Query OK, 26 rows affected (0.00 sec)

and check the filetype of /tmp/a

[satyavrk-~]$: file /tmp/a
/tmp/a:UTF-8 Unicode text

Q1)Since my character_set_results is latin1 , how is the filetype of /tmp/a is UTF-8 instead of latin1 or ISO-8859 English text?

Alternatively if I run

[satyavrk-~]$:  mysqldump -uroot  --databases my --tables ABC  --default-character-set=utf8 > 63794

and do

[satyavrk-~]$: file 63794
63794: ISO-8859 English text, with very long lines

Q2)Since I specified –default-character-set as UTF-8 the resultset should be utf8. But it is not! Why?

In both cases file type is different from expected

Can any one explain the point I am missing

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I guess the problem is with mysql client. If I try doing the same with mysql client of version 4 . the second problem is solved!

    In the documentation available at dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/select.html says “SELECT … INTO OUTFILE is the complement of LOAD DATA INFILE. Column values are dumped using the binary character set. In effect, there is no character set conversion. If a table contains columns in several character sets, the output data file will as well and you may not be able to reload the file correctly.” which means it doesn’t read character_set_results.

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