Home/ Questions/Q 101079
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-05-11T00:42:07+00:00

Is there a collation type which is officially recommended by MySQL, for a general

  • 0

Is there a collation type which is officially recommended by MySQL, for a general website where you aren’t 100% sure of what will be entered? I understand that all the encodings should be the same, such as MySQL, Apache, the HTML and anything inside PHP.

In the past I have set PHP to output in "UTF-8", but which collation does this match in MySQL? I’m thinking it’s one of the UTF-8 ones, but I have used utf8_unicode_ci, utf8_general_ci, and utf8_bin before, and I do not know which of these "utf8" maps to, or if that is the best to use.

Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. The main difference is sorting accuracy (when comparing characters in the language) and performance. The only special one is utf8_bin which is for comparing characters in binary format.

    utf8_general_ci is somewhat faster than utf8_unicode_ci, but less accurate (for sorting). The specific language utf8 encoding (such as utf8_swedish_ci) contain additional language rules that make them the most accurate to sort for those languages. Most of the time I use utf8_unicode_ci (I prefer accuracy to small performance improvements), unless I have a good reason to prefer a specific language.

    You can read more on specific unicode character sets on the MySQL manual – http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/charset-unicode-sets.html

    • 0