Question

I want to differ between characters c and č or e and é.

Is it possible to handle binary strings for mysql with Propel? Or can I handle it without Propel directly in my MySQL-database (only for one table, some other tables still shall treat it all the same). However, queries will still be executed with Propel (does Propel support BINARY in queries?).

Propel VARBINARY only maps to MySQL BLOB (which is the same as Propel BLOB) and Propel’s VARBINARY and BLOB seem pretty complicated to use (they return a resource id).

So I tried Propel CLOB, which maps to MySQL LONGTEXT. This works well in usage, but then again e and é are the same. So it is not different from my current VARCHAR.

Currently I am using VARCHAR with a length of 50.

Answer 1

General about collation

Using MySQL collation, you can specify how different characters stored in the column should be compared. To get a better overview on how each collation treats characters, you can look on collation-charts.org.

The binary collations will treat each characters differently, so characters like e and é are not the same.

To understand better how collations work, you could also have a look on the Turkish UTF-8 collation of MySQL. There you will see that ğ and g which are separate characters in Turkish are treated as different ones, whereas others are deemed the same.

Collations do not only specify which characters are the same, but also in which order they are sorted when you sort after a column.

Your choice in this case will be utf8_bin.

Usage of collations in Propel

To set the whole stuff in Propel you can use a <vendor> tag within your schema.xml:

<column name="tag" phpName="Tag" type="VARCHAR" size="50" required="true">
  <vendor type="mysql">
    <parameter name="Collate" value="utf8_bin"/>
  </vendor>
</column>