Question

On a database I’ll have to store names and such in UTF8, and hashes in latin1_bin. I called SET NAMES utf8, but I noticed that it corrupted the latin1 fields when I tried to read them (I was able to write them just fine). Which is odd, since if I understood correctly that query is only about sending data to the server, not receiving it.

phpMyAdmin displays broken data too.

Any clue about what I might be doing wrong?

(using MAMP 1.9.6)

edit: this answer specifies this is also the charset used to send data back to the client. I’m getting confused: what’s the point of specifying the charset of a column if that will be ignored anyway?

edit:
excerpt from the column definition:

  `tok` char(64) CHARACTER SET latin1 COLLATE latin1_bin NOT NULL,
  `sal` char(16) CHARACTER SET latin1 COLLATE latin1_bin NOT NULL,
...
) ENGINE=InnoDB  DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8 COLLATE=utf8_roman_ci ;

excerpt from queries:

SELECT tok,sal FROM user WHERE id=4 LIMIT 1

.

INSERT INTO user (tok, sal) VALUES (x'1387ea0c22277d3000bd23241c357e3a9ba45a2e28f50581d63a73bf785a7458a95cca4de27d0a86588f5bdfa94415d6a255c2c0379ebc2f00dacba03ae6b866', x'8fca28a592c29f245ff0a3ba5f97420c')

Answer 1

You should change your table definition to use MySql’s BINARY type, which is the perfect fit for this kind of data:

The BINARY and VARBINARY types are similar to CHAR and VARCHAR, except
that they contain binary strings rather than nonbinary strings. That
is, they contain byte strings rather than character strings. This
means that they have no character set, and sorting and comparison are
based on the numeric values of the bytes in the values.

The column definitions would become:

`tok` binary(64) NOT NULL,
`sal` binary(16) NOT NULL,