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Asked: 2026-05-24T12:08:27+00:00

I’m storing Unicode strings in a MySQL database with a Django web application. I

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I’m storing Unicode strings in a MySQL database with a Django web application. I can store Unicode data fine, but when querying, I find that é and e are treated as if they were the same character:

In [1]: User.objects.filter(last_name='Jildén')
Out[1]: [<User: Anders Jildén>]

In [2]: User.objects.filter(last_name='Jilden')
Out[2]: [<User: Anders Jildén>]

This is also the case when using the MySQL shell directly:

mysql> select last_name from auth_user where last_name = 'Jildén';
+-----------+
| last_name |
+-----------+
| Jildén   |
+-----------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

mysql> select last_name from auth_user where last_name = 'Jilden';
+-----------+
| last_name |
+-----------+
| Jildén   |
+-----------+
1 row in set (0.01 sec)

Here are the database charset settings:

mysql> SHOW variables LIKE '%character_set%';
+--------------------------+------------------------------------------------------+
| Variable_name            | Value                                                |
+--------------------------+------------------------------------------------------+
| character_set_client     | latin1                                               |
| character_set_connection | latin1                                               |
| character_set_database   | utf8                                                 |
| character_set_filesystem | binary                                               |
| character_set_results    | latin1                                               |
| character_set_server     | latin1                                               |
| character_set_system     | utf8                                                 |
| character_sets_dir       | /usr/local/Cellar/mysql/5.1.54/share/mysql/charsets/ |
+--------------------------+------------------------------------------------------+

here’s the table schema:

CREATE TABLE `auth_user` (
    `id` int(11) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
    `username` varchar(30) CHARACTER SET utf8 NOT NULL,
    `first_name` varchar(30) CHARACTER SET utf8 NOT NULL,
    `last_name` varchar(30) CHARACTER SET utf8 NOT NULL,
    `email` varchar(200) CHARACTER SET utf8 NOT NULL,
    `password` varchar(128) CHARACTER SET utf8 NOT NULL,
    `is_staff` tinyint(1) NOT NULL,
    `is_active` tinyint(1) NOT NULL,
    `is_superuser` tinyint(1) NOT NULL,
    `last_login` datetime NOT NULL,
    `date_joined` datetime NOT NULL,
    PRIMARY KEY (`id`),
    UNIQUE KEY `username` (`username`)
) ENGINE=InnoDB AUTO_INCREMENT=7952 DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8 COLLATE=utf8_bin

and here are the options I’m passing via Django’s DATABASES setting:

DATABASES = {
    'default': {
        # ...
        'OPTIONS': {
            'charset': 'utf8',
            'init_command': 'SET storage_engine=INNODB;',
        },
    },
}

Note that I have tried setting the table collation to utf8_bin, with no effect:

mysql> alter table auth_user collate utf8_bin;

mysql> select last_name from auth_user where last_name = 'Jilden';
+-----------+
| last_name |
+-----------+
| Jildén   |
+-----------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

How can I get MySQL to treat these as different characters?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    You were nearly there when you changed the table collation, but not quite. In MySQL, each column in a table has its own character set and collation. The table has its own character set and collation, but this does not override the column collations; it only determines what the collation will be for new columns that are added for which you don’t specify the collation. So you haven’t changed the collation of the column that you’re interested in.

    ALTER TABLE tablename MODIFY columnname
    varchar(???) CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_bin NOT NULL
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